Former doctor accused of genocide in Rwanda sentenced to 27 years in prison

On Wednesday, a court in Paris sentenced a former Rwandan doctor to 27 years in prison for his role in the 1994 genocide in his home country.

Eugene Rwamucyo (65) was found guilty of complicity in genocide, complicity in crimes against humanity and conspiracy to prepare the ground for these crimes.

He was acquitted of charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Throughout the four-week trial, Rwamucyo denied any wrongdoing.

Three decades after the genocide, several witnesses came to Paris for the trial and gave graphic descriptions of the killings in the Butare region, where Rwamucyo was at the time.

This is the seventh trial related to the April 1994 genocide to be held in a court in Paris over the past decade.

The massacres killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus from Rwanda’s minority who tried to protect them, at the hands of gangs of Hutu extremists backed by the military and police.

Angelique Uwamahoro, who was 13 years old at the time, said she came to court to “seek justice for my people who died for who they were.”

She said she saw Rwamucyo, her mother’s doctor, at the site of the massacre at the convent where she and her family had found refuge. Some of her family members were among the dead.

After she managed to escape, Ms Uwamahoro said she saw Rwamucyo again at a roadblock in the city of Butare and heard him encouraging militiamen to kill the Tutsi population.

“He wanted to get them to kill us so that we wouldn’t escape alive,” she said.

Other witnesses described mass graves and people burying bodies, including groups of prisoners who were asked to do the work. Some claimed that the wounded were buried alive.

According to the prosecutor’s office, Rwamucyo was accused of spreading anti-Tutsi propaganda and supervising the operation of burying victims in mass graves.

The former doctor said his role in the mass burials was motivated solely by “hygienic” reasons and denied that survivors were buried alive.

Rwamucyo was arrested in a suburb north of Paris in 2010. At that time he was working as a doctor in a hospital in northern France.

French police arrested him while attending the funeral of Jean Bosco Baravagwiza, considered one of the authors of the genocide.

Baravagwiza was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2003.

Last December, another doctor, Sosthene Munyemana, was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and aiding and abetting genocide and sentenced to 24 years in prison. He filed an appeal.