Thursday, December 20, 2012

Rwanda genocide: ICTR jails Augustin Ngirabatware

Grave of one of the victims during Rwanda's 1994 genocide

A UN war crimes court has sentenced a key organiser of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to 35 years in prison.

The sentence was imposed on Augustin Ngirabatware, a former government minister in Rwanda.
He is the last person to be tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which will now only hear appeals.
About 800,000 people - ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus - were killed in 100 days in Rwanda in 1994.
The ICTR convicted Ngirabatware of genocide, incitement to commit genocide and rape as a crime against humanity, the AFP news agency reports.
"For these crimes the court sentences you to 35 years in prison," Judge William Hussein Sekule told Ngirabatware.
He was planning minister in the militant Hutu-led government at the time of the genocide.
Ngirabatware was arrested in Germany in September 2007 and was transferred more than a year later to the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania.
The ICTR says on its website that it has completed 71 cases since it was set up under a UN Security Council resolution in November 1994 to try the ringleaders of the genocide.
Ten accused were acquitted while 32 convicts are serving sentences, it says.
It is due to close in 2014 after it has finalised 16 appeal cases.

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