Ex-Rwandan military policeman found guilty of genocide by Paris court
A Paris court has found a former Rwandan military policeman guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity during the 1994 slaughter in his home country and sentenced him to life in prison.
The court found Philippe Hategekimana, 66, guilty of nearly all the charges against him.
He fled to France after the genocide, obtaining refugee status and then French nationality under the name Philippe Manier.
The trial of Hategekimana, which began last month, was the fifth such trial in France of an alleged participant in the massacres.
More than 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994, according to UN figures, most of them from the Tutsi minority.
Hategekimana was charged with involvement in the murder of dozens of Tutsis and also setting up roadblocks to stop Tutsis who would then be killed in and around the southern provincial capital of Nyanza, where he worked as a senior police official.
Plaintiffs accused Hategekimana of “using the powers and military force conferred to him through his rank in order to … take part in the genocide”.
He was also accused of being involved in the murders of a nun and the mayor of the town of Ntyazo, who opposed the killings; of having a role in the killing of 300 Tutsi refugees on a hill called Nyamugari: and in an attack in which about 1,000 civilians died.
He fled France for Cameroon in late 2017 after the press reported that the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda, one of the plaintiffs in this week’s trial, had filed a complaint against him. He was arrested in the capital, Yaoundé, in 2018 and extradited to France. He denied the charges.
France, one of the top destinations for fugitives from the massacres, has tried and convicted a former spy chief, two ex-mayors, a former hotel chauffeur and an ex-top official in similar trials since 2014. But it has generally refused requests to extradite suspects to Rwanda, prompting the president, Paul Kagame, to accuse Paris of denying Rwanda jurisdiction.