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Suspect in Rwanda genocide goes on trial after decades-long investigation

Published:Wednesday | November 15, 2023 | 12:09 AM
Nyabimana (first name unknown), 26, shows machete wounds at an International Committee of the Red Cross Hospital in Nyanza, some 35 miles southwest of Kigali, Rwanda, on June 4, 1994. A 68-year-old Rwandan doctor who has been living in France for decades g
JEAN-MARC BOUJU
Nyabimana (first name unknown), 26, shows machete wounds at an International Committee of the Red Cross Hospital in Nyanza, some 35 miles southwest of Kigali, Rwanda, on June 4, 1994. A 68-year-old Rwandan doctor who has been living in France for decades goes on trial Tuesday in Paris over his alleged role in the 1994 genocide in his home country.

PARIS (AP):

A Rwandan doctor who has been living in France for decades goes on trial Tuesday in Paris over his alleged role in the 1994 genocide in his home country.

Sosthene Munyemana, 68, faces charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and complicity in such crimes. He has denied wrongdoing. If convicted, he faces a life sentence.

The trial comes nearly three decades after the genocide in which more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to protect them were killed between April and July 1994.

Munyemana arrived in September 1994 in France, where he has been living and working as a doctor until he recently retired.

He has been investigated for decades. Over 60 witnesses are expected to testify at his trial. Members of the Rwandan community in France first filed a complaint against Munyemana in 1995.

Munyemana was a 38-year-old gynaecologist in the district of Burate at the time of the genocide. He is accused of co-signing in April 1994 “a motion of support for the interim government” that supervised the genocide and of participating in a local committee and meetings that organised round-ups of Tutsi civilians.

He is also accused of detaining Tutsi civilians “without care, hygiene and food” in the office of the local administration that was “under his authority at the time”, and of relaying “instructions from the authorities to the local militia and residents leading to the round-up of the Tutsis,” among other things.

This is the sixth case related to the Rwandan genocide that is coming to court in Paris. The trial is scheduled to run until December 19.

Many suspected perpetrators left Rwanda during and after the genocide, some settling in Europe. Some never faced justice.

Only two fugitives indicted by the tribunal remain at large, it said.

In recent years, France has increased efforts to arrest and send to trial genocide suspects.

The mass killings of Rwanda’s Tutsi population were ignited on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying then-President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down and crashed in Kigali, the capital, killing the leader who, like most Rwandans, was a Hutu. Tutsis were blamed for downing the plane, and although they denied it, bands of Hutu extremists began killing them, including children, with support from the army, police and militias.