Another fugitive Rwandan genocide suspect who was among six prominent figures declared wanted for allegedly playing a major role in the country’s 1994 genocide, Phénéas Munyarugarama, has been confirmed dead, a United Nations prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said on Wednesday.
Munyarugarama who was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Rwandan Army at the time of the genocide, was one of the few remaining fugitives indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), was confirmed to have died less than a week after another major suspect, Protais Mpiranya, was confirmed to have died in 2006 in Zimbabwe.
Brammertz, a chief prosecutor with the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, in a statement confirming the death of Munyarugarama, said the fugitive “died from natural causes on or about 28 February, 2002, in Kankwala, in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where he was also buried.”
Munyarugarama, along with the other suspects, had been charged with genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity.
He was accused of responsibility for mass killings, attacks, and sexual violence against Tutsi civilians at various locations in the Bugesera region in the genocide that accounted for the killing of over 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutu ethnic group.
The mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi population was ignited on April 6, when a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down and crashed in the capital Kigali, killing the leader who, like most Rwandans, was an ethnic Hutu.
The Tutsi were blamed for downing the plane, and although they denied it, bands of Hutu extremists began killing them, including children, with support from the army, police and militias.