The Supreme Court yesterday heard an appeal case involving 21 suspects convicted for grenade attacks that claimed a number of people’s lives between 2009 and 2012. In January 2012, the High Court in Nyarugenge District handed the accused sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison. But the convicts claimed contradictions and biased evidence that was presented by the prosecution. The Supreme Court has, thus, been hearing the appeal and, yesterday, set January 29 as the date it will pronounce itself on the matter. The prosecution alleges that the group collaborated on a day-to-day basis with the DR Congo-based FDLR militia to destabilise the country by carrying out terror attacks using hand grenades. FDLR is blacklisted by the United Nations and US governmnet as a terrorist organisation, and it has been accused of committing gross human rights abuses in eastern DR Congo and neighbouring countries for close to two decades now. The militia is largely composed of elements who participated in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Under the guidance of a certain Jean Damascene Mukeshimana, who was a member of a remote gang of the militia that operated both in DR Congo and Burundi, hand grenades were supplied to sympathisers of the group to carry out the attacks, prosecution says. Speaking to The New Times after the appeal hearing, Pascal Byamukama, one of the lawyers representing the appellants, said they had appealed within 30 days of the ruling, back in 2012, but the case had been pending because of a case backlog in the country’s highest court. One of his clients in the case, Jean Damascene Nsengimana, is said to have been in direct contact with the gang’s mastermind to supply the grenades hidden in a sack of clothes in the Southern Province and City of Kigali. Nsengimana argued that he got the sack from David Nshimiyimana but was not aware there were explosives inside the bag. “I did not deny that I was part of FDLR militia, but I had repatriated back in 2006 with good intentions like others. I am appealing the decision of the court that I was indirectly involved in the grenade attacks in Butare (Huye District) and Nyabugogo in Nyarugenge District, Kigali. “I received the sack as a matter of rendering a service; I acted between a sender and the receiver, I don’t see why I should be implicated. I didn’t know what was in the sack anyway,” he told the court. A series of grenade attacks rocked Kigali and other parts of the country between 2009 and late 2012 that took the lives of over 20 people and injured hundreds.
