The United States on Tuesday accused a senior Kenyan official of harbouring a notorious warcrimes suspect wanted in connection with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and demanded action on the matter from the new, day-old government in Nairobi.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US ambassador at-large for war crimes issues, said the United States had hard evidence that the Kenyan official, Zakayo Cheruiyot, had been harbouring the suspect, Felicien Kabuga, for some time.
”The information indicates that Mr Cheruiyot has used the government infrastructure to maintain the fugitive status of Mr Kabuga,” Prosper told reporters at the State Department.
”This is clearly a problem and it needs to be addressed by the new government,” Prosper said. ”I expect we will raise this with the new president at the earliest opportunity.”
Prosper said it was not clear whether Cheruiyot, a civil servant who was the permanent secretary for public administration and internal security in former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi’s government, would retain his position in the new administration.
But he maintained that new Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, who took office only on Monday after winning elections last week on an anti-corruption platform, should be ready to punish Cheruiyot and bring Kabuga into custody.
”We see no reason why the president should not be able to take action on this,” Prosper said, adding that he and other officials in Washington were ”encouraged” by Kibaki’s calls for reform.
Kabuga is accused of bankrolling the Interahamwe militia, the Hutu extremists largely responsible for the Rwandan genocide, during which as many as a million people were slaughtered in a 100-day campaign to exterminate the country’s Tutsi minority population.
A wealthy financier, Kabuga was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on war crimes charges in 1998 but has used his assets to buy protection and has remained at large.
Prosper said US diplomats raised the Kabuga matter with Kenyan officials in Nairobi earlier this month and that it had also been a subject of discussion when the outgoing Moi visited Washington on December 4 and 5.
Prosper said Moi had offered assistance in bringing Kabuga to justice and that because of the former president’s efforts ”the net is closing” around the fugitive, who is now believed to be in the Nairobi area.
The information presented to Moi and other Kenyan officials was gleaned from eyewitness accounts of Kabuga under Cheruiyot’s protection, Prosper said.
He noted that agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had flown to Nairobi to interview the witnesses and had administered lie-detector tests to them which they passed. Witnesses have been streaming forward since the United States
re-launched a campaign this summer offering up to five million dollars for information that would lead to the arrests of 10 Rwandan genocide indictees, who include Kabuga, Prosper said.
In June, acting on information provided to the so-called ”Rewards for Justice” program, Kenyan police arrested a man resembling Kabuga but later determined that he was not the suspect.
However, Prosper said the new information was ”more credible and conclusive” than the earlier reports. The push for Kabuga’s arrest is a part of a renewed US initiative to arrest the remaining at-large ICTR indictees in 2003, he said.
”We’re going to dedicate 2003 to trying to bring into custody the remaining genocidaires in the Great Lakes and East Africa region,” Prosper said.
He noted that 2002 had seen the arrests of three indictees — one in Congo, one in the Democratic Republic of Congo and one in Angola — but said that those governments and that of Kenya needed to boost their efforts.
”We believe that a lot more needs to be done and we believe that the governments in the region need to not only continue their cooperation, but they need to step it up,” Prosper said. Prosper said there was ”credible” and ”good information” as to the whereabouts of five or six at-large indictees, including Kabuga, and that he believed they could all be arrested in the coming months.
”We think that we are closing in on them and we think that with a little more work and a little more cooperation from Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville as well as Kenya, we’ll be able to bring these individuals into custody early in the new year,” he
said.
Two indictees are believed to be in DRCongo and two or three in Congo, he added.
Prosper said he planned to visit the Great Lakes countries in early February to pursue the matter further with officials there. – Sapa-AFP