Death for witness killers
2004-03-06 10:24
Kigali - A Rwandan court has handed down death sentences to seven people for the murder of a potential prosecution witness in trials on the country's 1994 genocide, a prosecutor said on Saturday.
"Of the nine people charged with the murder of Emile Ndahimana, seven were sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment and one to five years in prison," Gikongoro prosecutor Desire Kayinamua said.
Killed last year in the southern Gikongoro district, Emile Ndahimana was a survivor of the 1994 mass slaughter which the UN has estimated claimed 800 000 lives, mostly members of the Tutsi minority.
Ndahimana "was an embarrassing witness for the executioner," Kayinamua said, in an allusion to Andre Nkundabagenzi, who has been sentenced to death for being a main participant in the genocide but has been on bail for the past four years because his case was not ready to go to trial.
The Gikongoro district court has since February heard cases on the murder of two other potential genocide witnesses, handing down five death penalties to five people and two life sentences.
In all the cases the murder victims had said they planned to testify against genocide suspects in the gacacas - hearings in which suspects are judged by whole villages.
The open-air hearings were set up in 2002 to deal with thousands of people in Rwanda's overcrowded prisons who faced relatively minor charges but who could not be brought to justice because the country's courts had collapsed.