September 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –
A Rwandan court has sentenced a man accused of complicity during the 1994 genocide against Tutsis and moderate Hutus to 20 years in prison, after he was extradited from the Netherlands in July 2021 in connection with claims made by the Rwandan justice system.
The High Court of International Crimes (HCCIC) has found that the accused, Venant Rutunga, was complicit in genocide and extermination during the 1994 massacres, when he was regional director of the Rwanda Institute of Agricultural Sciences.
He said that both his statements and those made by witnesses confirmed that he called numerous gendarmes to the centre, located in the Huye district and where thousands of people had sought refuge trying to escape the massacres, according to the Rwandan newspaper ‘The New Times’.
The man was arrested in the Netherlands in 2019 and handed over two years later after losing the legal process to avoid his extradition. The Rwandan prosecution then said that Rutunga was suspected of being involved in the genocide in the former prefecture of Butare, where Huye is located.
Some 800,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed by Hutu extremists over a period of about three months in 1994. Mass graves are still being discovered today, especially since convicted prisoners who have served their sentences have come forward to provide information about where they buried or abandoned their victims.
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