Rwanda Asks For Massacre Suspect

Rwanda’s government asked Cameroon on Tuesday to extradite a former Rwandan army colonel accused of masterminding the 1994 massacre of at least half a million people.

Theoneste Bagosora is also wanted by Belgium for the murders of 10 of its U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda. He was arrested Sunday in Yaounde, Cameroon.

Bagosora is believed to have helped engineer the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus after the death of the country’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, in a mysterious plane crash on April 6, 1994.

The Belgian peacekeepers were tortured and killed by Rwanda’s presidential guard on April 7, the first day of nearly four months of slaughter in Rwanda. They had been assigned to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was also murdered.

Bagosora was commander of the Kanombe military base at Rwanda’s main airport on the outskirts of the capital of Kigali. Human rights groups say he was the key organizer of the massacres and ordered the executions of thousands of people.

The new government of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which took power in July 1994, is eager to try those responsible for the genocide, but it does not have extradition treaties with many countries where they have fled into exile, including Cameroon.

If Bagosora is extradited to Rwanda, he could face the death penalty if convicted of genocide. An estimated 67,000 suspects are crammed into local jails awaiting judicial procedures. Most of them have not been formally charged because Rwanda’s legal system isn’t functional.