Rwandan pastor gets life
2010-02-18 21:19
Kigali - A Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Peday Ntihanabayo, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in Rwanda's 1994 genocide by a grass-roots gacaca appeals court, state radio said on Thursday.
Ntihanabayo had been acquitted by a lower court in the gacaca system, set up to judge the bulk of Rwanda's genocide suspects.
He appeared alongside 10 other suspects, seven of whom were acquitted, at the gacaca appeals court in Gitarama in the centre of the country.
Ntihanabayo was found guilty notably of being complicit in the murder of one of his flock, Eliezer Mpumuje, in the Adventist parish in Nyabisindu in the south of the country, the radio said.
Ntihanabayo was sheltering Mpumuje but then turned him over to the killers, the sentence said. The radio said Mpumuje had been buried in the yard of the church and that for years the pastor had bought the silence of the witnesses who saw him buried.
Several Adventist, Roman Catholic and Protestant clerics have been tried by various types of court for their implication in the genocide, which left an estimated 800 000 people dead, essentially Tutsis.
The gacaca are a revamped version of the traditional assemblies that used to resolve disputes in Rwandan villages. They are in the process of drawing to an end, with the vast majority of cases already wrapped up.
The gacaca courts are allowed to try all categories of genocide perpetrator, except those considered to have been planners at national level.
- SAPA