ARUSHA: A UN-backed court yesterday acquitted on appeal a Rwandan ex-paramilitary police chief and another former top officer of charges related to the 1994 genocide.
General Augustin Ndindiliyimana was acquitted on the grounds that he did not have effective authority over the subordinates for whose abuses he had been sentenced. Major Francois-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, the former commander of an elite battalion, was acquitted because the judges said his implication in the assassination of the prime minister and the killing of 10 Belgian blue helmets — crimes in which men from his battalion took part — had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
The Arusha, Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) reduced the sentence of a third officer, Innocent Sagahutu, a squadron commander in the elite reconnaissance unit, from 20 years behind bars to 15. The ICTR said it would hand down its decision on a fourth officer, former army chief Augustin Bizimungu, at a later date.
The UN-backed court was set up in late 1994 to try the alleged masterminds behind the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed.
Lesser perpetrators have been tried before other jurisdictions, either in the formal court system in Rwanda or before thousands of grassroots tribunals called gacacas, which have handed down punishments including prison sentences and forced labour in the community.
The ICTR had in May 2011 sentenced Ndindiliyimana to 11 years imprisonment for genocide crimes, a term he had already served in preventive detention since his arrest in Belgium in 2000. The appeal judges argued that their lower court colleagues had been incoherent in sentencing Ndindiliyimana. AFP
