Turk calls the arrest of one of the main defendants for the Rwandan genocide a “victory”

May 25. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, described this Thursday as a “victory” the arrest of Fulgence Kayishema, one of the main defendants for his role in the genocide in 1994 in Rwanda.

“The arrest of Fulgence Kayishema is another victory for justice and her upcoming trial will hopefully bring some comfort to the survivors of her alleged crimes,” Turk said in a statement issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for the human rights

In this sense, he has stressed that the arrest of Kayishema, which occurs three years after the arrest of Felicien Kabuga, sends “a clear message” to the other three defendants who are still at large that “no matter how long it takes” that “justice will not cease in its search” to arrest those implicated in the genocide.

The Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) has reported this Thursday that Kayishema was arrested in the city of Paarl in the framework of a joint operation by the body and the South African authorities after more than two decades in unknown whereabouts.

Kayishema, who used various aliases and false documents to hide his identity during his time on the run, was indicted in 2001 for genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity for acts in Kivumu commune, in Kivumu prefecture. Kibuyu.

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

For his part, Kabuga, the Rwandan millionaire owner of the so-called Free Thousand Hills Radio Television (RTLM), was arrested in 2020 by a team of French investigators who discovered him living in an apartment in Paris, where he lived under a false identity. .

Kabuga is being tried for financing the operations of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militias that massacred, in just 100 days, more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus through the vast fortune he accumulated during the 1970s.

To this day, mass graves are still being discovered, especially since convicts who have served their sentences have provided information about the place where their victims were buried or abandoned.