The Court of Appeal has upheld genocide convict Ladislas Ntaganzwa's life sentence.

The 60-year old, a former Mayor of Nyakizu (in Nyaruguru), was appealing against a life sentence handed to him by the High Court Chamber for International and Cross-border Crimes (HCCICC) in 2020, having found him guilty of crimes including genocide, as well as murder and rape as crimes against humanity.

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He is said to have committed the crimes in the area he was leading in 1994, where for example, he was at the helm of the April 15, 1994 attacks against the Tutsi who had sought refuge at Cyahinda Catholic Parish in Nyakizu Commune.

Witnesses who testified against him during the first instance trial said he brought the policemen from Butare to Cyahinda, and ordered them to shoot the Tutsi civilians who were gathered at the catholic parish.

After the Court’s verdict, Ntaganzwa filed an appeal, where he complained about a number of factors, among which was the claim that the witness' accounts used against him during the first instance trial were not legitimate.

He noted that the people who testified that they saw him in the Cyahinda attacks contradicted each other in regard to the clothes he was dressed in, as some said they were military while others civilian.

However, responding to his claims, Prosecutor Faustin Nkusi said the way Ntaganzwa was dressed on that day was something that the witnesses can forget after more than 20 years, but what matters most is that there is enough evidence that he was on scene, a fact that he – himself did not deny.

A witness account cited by Nkusi stated that Ntaganzwa told the Tutsi gathering at the parish:

"You used your money to buy cows; we used ours to buy guns. Now stand tall and let the cow horns face off with the bullets."

After that statement, as many Tutsi were slain.

Delivering the appeal ruling on Friday, March 3, the judges at the Court of Appeal said Ntaganzwa’s appeal is not valid, and upheld the entire verdict that the HCCICC issued in 2020.

Ntaganzwa was arrested in 2015 in the DR Congo and extradited to Rwanda in 2016.

He was one of the nine people indicted by the now defunct International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but had not yet been arrested by the time the UN court closed shop in 2015.

In 2012, the ICTR, as part of its completion strategy, decided to refer to Rwandan prosecution the case files of six of the nine major suspects who had remained at large.