RUBAVU - Police in Rubavu, Western Province are holding a male domestic employee, after confessing to the gruesome murder of three infants and hiding their dead bodies in a kitchen ceiling. 

Two of the children, Alain Bizimungu 3 and Viviane Tumukunde 16 are children of Rajab Bizimungu, the head-coach of Etincelles Fc, while the third, only identified as Cynthia, aged 6, is a daughter of a family friend.

The employee, identified as Jean Damascene Manizabayo strangled the trio using a shoelace after defiling Tumukunde.
He had been left home with the children under his custody after the parents travelled for the weekend to the Burundian capital, Bujumbura.

On return, the parents could neither trace the children nor the houseboy.

"We thought the elder girl had taken the children to visit family friends but we were alarmed to find the houseboy missing,” said a tearful Bizimungu.

He said that they had come to trust the house help so much that they had even sent him back to school: "He was like our own son.”

After alerting the police, a search was mounted and Manizabayo was found hiding at his father’s home in Karago sector, Nyabihu.

Manizabayo, during an interview at Gisenyi police post, where he is currently detained, pleaded guilty to the killings, claiming to have been possessed by demons.

"It started when Viviane brought me food, I failed to eat, later I went to her bed and forced her to have sex with me.

Thereafter, I felt like killing all of them which I did using a shoe-lace then hid their bodies in the kitchen ceiling,” Manizabayo said.

"These evil spirits controlled me, it was after the incident that I realised what a horrible thing I had done, I wish I could get a chance of saying sorry to the parents of deceased,” he said.

Bizimungu, the father of the deceased children was at one time the coach of Mukura Victory Sports, a first division football club based in the Southern Province.

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