A United Nations-backed tribunal on Tuesday convicted a former senior Rwandan army officer of playing a major role in the country’s 1994 genocide and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, officials said.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found ex-colonel Aloys Simba guilty of genocide and extermination during the 100-day massacres in which about 800 000 people, mainly minority Tutsis, were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, they said.
The former officer had faced five counts but was acquitted on two charges and conspiracy to commit genocide and one murder charge, according to the independent Hirondelle News Agency covering the ICTR proceedings.
Prosecutors had sought the maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Simba, but the court sentenced him to 25 years, Hirondelle said, quoting court officials and the verdict.
Simba (67) was among a group of soldiers that helped Rwanda’s late president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, take power in a bloodless 1973 coup and remained very close to the leader until his death.
Habyarimana’s April 6 1994 assassination sparked the massacres of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in which Simba was accused of playing a leading role, in the southern provinces of Gikongoro and Butare.
Prosecution witnesses, including a former Rwandan soldier, testified that Simba had told colleagues after Habyarimana’s death that he had been called out of retirement to ”eliminate this filth”, referring to Tutsis.
One witness said Simba then distributed arms and grenades to his followers before ordering them to kill the Tutsis.
Simba’s lawyer, Sadikou Alao from Benin, had argued the prosecution failed to prove the charges in the indictment and produced no evidence to suggest his client had intended to commit any of the crimes of which he was accused.
Simba, who denied all the charges, was arrested in Senegal in 2001 and transferred to ICTR detention facilities in Tanzania’s northern town of Arusha the following year.
His trial opened in August last year, but was suspended several times, at least once due to safety concerns for both prosecution and defence witnesses.
One defence witness refused to appear last December after allegedly receiving death threats and an early prosecution witness was killed in Rwanda shortly after returning from the ICTR, which later found no link between the court role and the murder.
Set up in late 1994 to prosecute the architects and main perpetrators of the genocide, the ICTR has now convicted 24 suspects and acquitted three. — Sapa-AFP