The verdict was handed down this Thursday afternoon: Venant Rutunga, former director of a research institute, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for complicity in genocide. A verdict handed down more than three years after his extradition from the Netherlands, and two years after the opening of his trial in Rwanda.
The Special Chamber of the High Court for International Crimes, established in the Nyanza district, found Venant Rutunga guilty of complicity in genocide, in particular for having called gendarmes who committed massacres in ISAR Rubona, an agricultural research institute in the south of the country, reports our correspondent in Kigali, Lucie Mouillaud.
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In 1994, Venant Rutunga was then regional director. When the killings began, more than a thousand inhabitants came to take refuge in the institute’s compound. Venant Rutunga brought in the soldiers and the Interahamwe militia.
The judges did not retain the two other charges, crime of genocide and crime against humanity, a decision that Philibert Gakwenzire, the president of the Ibuka survivors’ association, did not expect, even if according to him, the Rwandan justice system has proven that the accused was a ” essential link ” to the realization of genocide.
- RFI
