At the end of a two-year mass trial, a court has convicted 100 people on various charges relating to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and sentenced 11 to death, a state prosecutor said on Monday.
JM Ntete, prosecutor for Butare province, said charges against the 139 accused ranged from rape to torture and murder to crimes against humanity, all committed during the 100-day slaughter in mid-1994 during which at least half a million people were killed, most of them members of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. Political moderates from the Hutu majority were also victims.
The three-judge tribunal, which conducted the country’s largest mass trial in a temporary courtroom built in the settlement where the crimes were committed, sentenced 71 of the accused to life in prison and 18 others to terms ranging from 25 years to one year. It acquitted 39 in a sentencing hearing that ended August 1.
Those who received the death penalty were convicted of being planners and masterminds of the slaughter and included influential people in Mugusa settlement like former deputy mayor Sylvestre Karekezi.
Since Rwanda began trying those accused in connection with the genocide, more than 400 people have received the death sentence, but only 26 have been executed, 24 of them in April 1998.
In neighbouring Tanzania, a United Nations tribunal is also trying people indicted on major genocide charges. The maximum sentence that tribunal can hand down is life in prison.
Some 120 000 prisoners in Rwanda await trial on genocide charges in overcrowded jails.
In an attempt to clear up the backlog, authorities have released a number of prisoners facing lesser charges to their home areas where they are facing trial in traditional courts known as gacaca. – Sapa-AP