Genocide officer gets 20yrs
2007-07-05 15:26
Brussels - A court in Brussels sentenced a former Rwandan army officer to 20 years in prison on Thursday for killing 10 Belgian United Nations peacekeepers and an "undetermined number" of Rwandans in 1994.
Prosecutors had asked for a life term for 55-year-old Bernard Ntuyahaga, who was found guilty on Wednesday of the killings, but the 12-member jury showed clemency because he had "saved the lives of some Tutsis, out of friendship".
Ntuyahaga was convicted of "premeditated homicide" for ordering that the paratroopers, be seized and taken to "Camp Kigali" military barracks, where they were lynched.
The soldiers had been escorting the then Rwandan prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, an ethnic Tutsi.
800 000 people killed
They were taking the premier to a radio station to make a public call for national unity, just hours after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed after his plane was downed by unknown assailants.
That assassination sparked the Rwandan genocide in which some 800 000 people - mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus - were massacred by Hutu extremists in the central African country.
Rwandan troops killed the UN peacekeepers, accusing them of being behind the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane. Their slaughter shocked Belgium, which withdrew its personnel from Rwanda immediately afterwards.
Ntuyahaga, who had denied all the charges against him, was also found guilty of the killing of several of his neighbours, including a former mistress, in Kigali as they tried to flee the genocide.
But, the court acquitted Ntuyahaga of responsibility for the murder of Uwilingiyimana, who was killed at her home on April 07 1994 after the peacekeepers protecting her had been disarmed.
Ntuyahaga was tried in Brussels under Belgium's so called "universal competence" law allowing people accused of crimes against humanity to be judged here as long as their case was linked to the country.
It was the third trial in Belgium related to the events in Rwanda.