June 11 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Fulgence Kayishema, one of the main defendants for his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and who was arrested on May 25 in South Africa, faces 54 charges.
The defendant will face nine charges of fraud, ten of violating the Refugee Law and 35 for breaching the country’s Immigration Law on June 20, according to the African agency APA News.
The “world’s most wanted genocide fugitive”, according to the UN, has been detained in South Africa after more than two decades missing, the Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) confirmed on Thursday.
The IRMCT said in a statement 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, including obtaining and distributing gasoline to burn the church. with these people inside
After this attempt failed, Kayishema and others involved in the massacre used a bulldozer to tear down the church, burying the refugees, who died in the rubble. Subsequently, they supervised the transfer of corpses to mass graves for the next two days.
During her period on the run, Kayishema used various aliases and false documents to hide her identity, while receiving support from relatives and former members of the Forces Démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda (FDLR) — a rebel armed group founded and composed mainly of Hutus responsible for the genocide– and others who support the genocidal ideology of the Hutu Power movement.
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.
