A precursor to the War Crime trials of
Cheney,
Bush and
Rumsfeld?
A senior Rwandan military officer charged with being one of the masterminds of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which bands of Hutus massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, was convicted on Thursday by a United Nations court in Tanzania of genocide and sentenced to life in prison.
In a statement, the United Nations tribunal said that it had sentenced the officer, Col. Theoneste Bagosora, and his accomplices, two other Rwandan military officers who were also on trial, Maj. Aloys Ntabakuze and Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, to life imprisonment for “genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” A fourth co-defendant, Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, was acquitted of all charges against him and the court ordered his release.
Colonel Bagosora, 67, was the cabinet director for Rwanda’s Defense Ministry at the start of the slaughter by Hutus of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus in 1994. The three other senior army officers had been on trial with him since 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania.
The court said that Colonel Bagosora had been “the highest authority in the Rwandan Defense Ministry with authority over the military” in the days after the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.
Source: NYT
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