The Court of Appeals has postponed the verdict in case of Ladislas Ntaganzwa to March 3. Initially, the verdict had to be issued on Friday, February 17. Ntaganzwa, 60, was Bourgmester (Mayor) of the former Nyakizu Commune (in Nyaruguru district). He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the High Court Chamber for International Crimes (HCCIC) in 2020, having found him guilty of genocide, as well as rape and murder as crimes against humanity. Prosecutors accused him of playing a key role in the killings that took place in the political jurisdiction he was leading in 1994, where among other things, he is said to have presided over the April 15 attacks against the Tutsi who had sought refuge at Cyahinda Catholic Parish where many lives perished. In December 2022, he filed an appeal to the Kigali-based Court of Appeals, challenging the HCCIC's decision. His appeal plea was based on a number of factors, for example, he claimed that the witness' accounts that were used against him during the first instance trial at the HCCIC were not legitimate. He insisted that the witnesses who testified that they saw him in the Cyahinda attacks contradicted each other in what they said. For instance, he said they did not agree on the type of clothes in which he was dressed. In response, Prosecutor Faustin Nkusi said the way Ntaganzwa was dressed on that day was something very trivial that witnesses can forget after twenty years. He noted that what matters is the fact that there is enough evidence that pins Ntaganzwa to having been on the scene, including the fact that Ntaganzwa himself admitted that he was there. Ntaganzwa was arrested in 2015 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and extradited to Rwanda in 2016. He was one of the nine people indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but had not yet been arrested by the time the UN court closed shop in 2015.
