Protais Mpiranya, one of the most wanted suspects in the 1994 Rwandan genocide where close to one million people were killed, has been confirmed dead.
United Nations prosecutors investigating the case in The Hague, while announcing the death of the fugitive who was hiding in Zimbabwe on Friday said “following a difficult and intensive investigation, the Office of the Prosecutor has determined that Mpiranya died on 5 October, 2006, in Harare, Zimbabwe.”
Mpiranya who was a Hutu Major at the time of the crisis, was accused of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and was considered the most important of the six remaining fugitives indicted by the former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
At the start of the genocide, Mpiranya, along with others, allegedly murdered the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana on 7 April,1994, because he did not accept the random killings of people of the Tutsi ethnic group.
“On the morning of 7 April 1994, Protais Mpiranya and two other military officials ordered their subordinates to go in search of the Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, in order to kill her,” the ICTR prosecutor wrote in the indictment.
“The desecrated body of Ms. Uwilingiyimana, the first woman to have held that position, was then exposed, naked, for passers-by to see,” prosecutor added.
Mpiranya was also accused of masterminding the killings or causing the death of 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, as well as 10 Belgian peacekeepers in charge of the protection of several leading political figures.
He was also said to be the brain behind an attack on a plane carrying then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana which was shot down as it approached Kigali International Airport.
The president was returning from a regional meeting in Dar es Salaam where he had agreed to set up the transitional institutions provided for in the Arusha agreements, which were supposed to put an end to a civil war between the Hutu authorities in Kigali and a Tutsi rebellion in 1993.
Several personalities and senior politicians in favour of the Arusha Accords were subsequently assassinated by Mpiranya and his men with the aim being to “create a political vacuum and frustrate the implementation of the Arusha Accords”, according to the prosecution.
After the end of the genocide in July 1994, Mpiranya began a long journey of exile that took him to several African countries and ended up in Zimbabwe where he worked for the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), made up partly of former genocidaires and accused of exploiting minerals in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).