UN tribunal increases jail term for Ndahimana to 25 years

A United Nations court, known as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), today increased Genocide suspect Grégoire Ndahimana’s jail term to 25 years up from 15 years. The suspect, who had appealed the initial sentence, was found guilty of multiple crimes during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which claimed more than one million lives. The convict, a former mayor in Kivumu, Western Rwanda, was found guilty for bulldozing a church with 2,000 innocent people. Ndahimana, in his early 60s, had initially been sentenced to 15 years in jail in 2011. The ICTR had found him guilty of failing to take measures against police involved in an April 1994 attack on Tutsis who had taken refuge in the church in Nyange area, and of having tacitly approved the destruction of the church the following day. The appeal judges confirmed that Ndahimana was guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. They said he had celebrated the bulldozing of the church by drinking beer with other local officials. When the sentence was read out, the former mayor collapsed into a chair and his wife wept in the public gallery. Ndahimana was arrested in August 2009 in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where many Genocide perpetrators fled to after the Rwanda Patriotic Front halted the three-month bloodshed. He is the third person to be tried by ICTR over the destruction of the Nyange church, after the parish priest Athanase Seromba and businessman Gaspard Kanyarukiga.

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UN tribunal increases jail term for Ndahimana to 25 years