A former Rwandan prefect, Laurent Bucyibaruta, was sentenced on Tuesday evening by the Paris Assize Court to twenty years’ imprisonment for complicity in genocide, more than twenty-eight years after the extermination of Tutsis in Rwanda.
The former senior civil servant, who is now 78, was acquitted as a perpetrator of genocide, but found guilty as an accomplice to genocide and crimes against humanity for four massacres, after almost eleven hours of deliberation.
Laurent Bucyibaruta, who appeared free under judicial supervision since May 9, will spend the night in prison. He was escorted by gendarmes shortly after the verdict was announced.
The prosecution had requested life imprisonment against him, considering him an accomplice in a massacre of Tutsi and author of four others in his prefecture of Gikongoro.
This region of southern Rwanda was one of the hardest hit by the genocide which claimed at least 800,000 lives in the country between April and July 1994, according to the UN.
The court totally acquitted Laurent Bucyibaruta of the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed at the parish of Kibeho on April 14, 1994, as well as those concerning the executions of Tutsi prisoners at Gikongoro prison.
She recognized him as an accomplice in genocide and crimes against humanity for the massacres of the school under construction in Murambi and the parishes of Cyanika and Kaduha, all committed on April 21, 1994.
He is also convicted for complicity in these crimes for the executions of students at the Marie Merci school in Kibeho, and those committed during rounds and at roadblocks.
His defense pleaded acquittal.
In his last words to magistrates and jurors before they retired to deliberate, the former senior official insisted that he had “never been on the side of the killers”.
He was the highest Rwandan official ever tried in France for crimes related to the genocide of Tutsis, after the final convictions of a military officer and two mayors, and the conviction at first instance of a driver who appealed.
Laurent Bucyibaruta has ten days to appeal his conviction.