(Cape Town) Fulgence Kayishema, suspected of having played a major role in the genocide in Rwanda and arrested this week in South Africa after a run for 22 years, was placed in pre-trial detention on Friday before an upcoming extradition.
Mr. Kayishema, 62, who was until his arrest on Wednesday one of the last four fugitives wanted for their role in the genocide of 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans by Hutu extremists, appeared impassive in the dock, a prayer book in hand.
Stocky figure, bald, wearing thin glasses, the sexagenarian, framed by armed officers equipped with bulletproof vests, admitted to being the man wanted by international justice. A master in the borrowing of false identities, according to investigators, he recently used the name of Donatien Nibashumba.
The vagueness still reigns over his career during all the years during which he escaped justice. But according to the South African prosecutor’s office, he started a family and applied for asylum in 2000 and then refugee status in 2004, still under an assumed name.
Finally unmasked and spotted on a farm in Paarl, about sixty kilometers from Cape Town, he was arrested with the help of Interpol, UN prosecutors announced on Thursday. “A powerful message showing that those suspected of having committed such crimes cannot escape justice”, for the spokesman of the UN Stéphane Dujarric.
Mr. Kayishema was the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Mechanism (MICT) responsible since 2015 for completing the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set up by the UN after the genocide.
PHOTO NIC BOTHMA, REUTERS
Fulgence Kayishema
He would have benefited, to cover his tracks, from the help of relatives as well as members of the former Rwandan Armed Forces and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and people adhering to the genocidal ideology of Hutu Power.
Mass graves
The accused has been remanded to a maximum security prison in Cape Town ahead of an upcoming hearing on June 2. The issue of his extradition was not discussed during his brief appearance.
According to the Ministry of Justice contacted by AFP, he should be extradited without delay to be tried by an international tribunal, in The Hague or Arusha in Tanzania.
Fulgence Kayishema was a judicial police inspector during the genocide in Rwanda and “one of the most wanted fugitives in the world for genocide”, according to international justice.
He “directly participated in the planning and execution” of the massacre of more than 2,000 Tutsi refugees in the church of Nyange, in the commune of Kivumu (North-East), “in particular by procuring and distributing gasoline to burn down the church with the refugees inside,” according to UN prosecutors.
“When that failed, Mr. Kayishema and others used a bulldozer to collapse the church, burying and killing the refugees inside,” according to the indictment. He would then have participated in the supervision of the transfer of the corpses to mass graves.
The ex-fugitive is charged by international justice with genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.
The ICTR convicted a total of 62 people. Others, like Augustin Bizimana, one of the main architects of the genocide, died without facing international justice.
The trial of Félicien Kabuga, an alleged financier of the genocide, opened in September 2022 but was suspended in March while it was decided whether he was healthy enough to remain in the dock.
Three fugitives are still wanted by international justice for their alleged role in the Rwandan genocide.