• Handed 19 yrs in absentia

KIGALI - Victoire Ingabire’s assistant, Joseph Ntawangundi, the man who came to the limelight in the saga at Kinyinya Sector, is a wanted Genocide fugitive who, in 2007, was sentenced in absentia to 19 years in prison by a Gacaca Court.

Ntawangundi was found guilty by the Gacaca court in Rusenyi cell, Gitwe sector in the former Kibungo Province, present day Ngoma, for killing two young people only identified as Nsabimana and Hategeka.

The two were students of IAVE Gitwe Secondary School in Kibungo where he was a director at the time. He was also found guilty of conspiring with militias to murder eight other people.

According to Beline Uwineza, the coordinator of Gacaca in the Eastern Province, Ntawangundi fled in 1994 to Benaco Refugee Camp in Tanzania before finding his way to Europe.

"His file and arrest warrant have been around. His case was a category two type. We were surprised when we saw his pictures in the news media after all these years,” she said. 
"The arrest warrant is still valid of course. The next step will be to make sure he serves his jail term. Gacaca will do everything within its means to bring him to book”.

Witnesses testified that Ntawangundi being the director of the school, many students ran to him for protection during the Genocide, but that he kept turning them away and they would then be killed by militias lurking outside.

The two children he killed had also run to him for protection.

He is one of the thousands of people whom Gacaca has sentenced in absentia.

This is the second time that someone connected to the presidential aspirant is discovered to have links to the killings of innocent people during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

Ingabire’s own mother, Therese Dusabe, had also been found guilty earlier on two separate occasions and sentenced to 30 years and life respectively.

Ends