Legal News

U.N. Hands Rwanda Genocide Mastermind Life in Prison

By Dan Slater

Theoneste Bagosora reacts as he sits in the court at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008, where he was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. (AP/ICTR)

In March, we noted that the United Nations war crimes court upheld the war crimes and genocide conviction of Reverend Athanase Seromba, and increased his sentence to life in prison, for his role in the Rwanda genocide, which claimed the lives of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the spring of 1994.

Today, a U.N. court in Tanzania convicted Col. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, a senior Rwandan military officer charged with being one of the masterminds of the slaughter, to life in prison. Here’s a report from the NYT.

In a statement, the U.N. tribunal said it sentenced the officer and his accomplices, two other Rwandan military officers who were also on trial, to life imprisonment for “genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” But a fourth co-defendant, Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, was acquitted of all charges against him and the court ordered his release.

The court said that Bagosora had been “the highest authority in the Rwandan Defense Ministry with authority over the military” in the days after the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. The president, a Hutu, died when his plane was shot down over the airport of Kigali, the Rwandan capital. This sparked the three-month massacre.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 18, 2008 (boomark / email).