A Paris court on Wednesday sentenced a Rwandan medical doctor, Eugène Rwamucyo, to 27 years in prison for his involvement in the 1994 genocide in his home country.
65-year-old Rwamucyo was found guilty of “complicity in genocide,” “complicity in crimes against humanity” and “conspiracy” to prepare the ground for the crimes.
Rwamucyo denied any wrongdoing all along the four-week trial but was acquitted of the charges of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
Three decades after the genocide, several witnesses travelled to Paris for the four-week trial and gave graphic descriptions of the killings in the Butare region where Rwamucyo was at the time.
Rwamucyo was arrested in a suburb north of Paris in 2010 where he was working as a medical doctor in a hospital in northern France at the time.
French police officers arrested him as he was attending the funeral of Jean Bosco Baravagwiza, who was considered one of the masterminds of the genocide.
Baravagwiza had been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2003.
This is the seventh trial related to the genocide of April 1994 that has come to court in Paris in the past decade.
The massacre saw more than 800,000 of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to protect them killed by gangs of Hutu extremists, backed by the army and police.
Angélique Uwamahoro, who was 13 at the time, said she came to court to “seek justice for my people, who died for who they were.”
She said she saw Rwamucyo, who was her mother’s doctor, at the scene of a massacre in a convent where she and her family had found refuge.
The dead included some of her family members.
After she managed to escape, Uwamahoro said she saw Rwamucyo again at a roadblock in the town of Butare and heard him encouraging militiamen to kill Tutsi people.
“He wanted to incite them to kill us so we don’t get out alive,” she said.
Other witnesses described mass graves and people burying bodies, including groups of prisoners who had been asked to do the job. Some said wounded people were buried alive.
Rwamucyo was accused of spreading anti-Tutsi propaganda and supervising operations to bury victims in mass graves, according to the prosecution.
The former doctor said his role in the mass burials was motivated only by “hygiene-related” considerations and denied survivors were buried alive.
