June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Fulgence Kayishema, one of the main defendants for his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, has claimed asylum this Tuesday in South Africa, where he was arrested at the end of May after more than two decades in unknown whereabouts.
Kayishema, who has appeared during the day before a South African court addressing the case, has withdrawn his request for release on bail to request asylum, as revealed by his lawyer, Juan Smuts, according to the newspaper ‘The Times’.
For his part, the spokesman for the Cape Town Prosecutor’s Office, Eric Ntabazalila, has indicated that the defendant’s defense “has not indicated whether his client intends to submit a request for release on bail later.” “The State will oppose a request for bail,” he has advanced.
The Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) indicated on May 25 that the man on the run since 2001 was arrested in the city of Paarl as part of a joint operation by the agency and the South African authorities. Kayishema is accused of orchestrating the killing of nearly 2,000 Tutsi refugees in a Catholic church during the genocide.
Kayishema was indicted in 2001 for genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity for acts in Kivumu commune, Kibuyu prefecture. The man is suspected of murdering more than 2,000 men, women, children and the elderly who had sought refuge in the Nyange church, including his direct involvement in planning and carrying out the massacre.
Some 800,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsi and moderate Hutu, were killed by Hutu extremists over nearly three months in 1994. Mass graves are still being discovered today, especially since convicts who have served their sentences have provided information about the place where they buried or abandoned their victims.
