Residents of Agatare village in the Kinyinya suburb of Kigali woke up to a shock on Monday, October 2, when they discovered that a couple who lived in their neighbourhood had died in their house.
The deceased – Janvier Nzabarinda and his wife Claudine Muteteri, both 48-years-old – were found lifeless at their residence at around 9am, an incident that caused alarm in the area especially due to the appalling way they had died.
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Information from the neighbours suggest that the man might have committed suicide after killing his wife. They told The New Times that Muteteri’s body had wounds on the neck and back, while Nzabarinda’s was found hanging on a rope in the sitting room.
Betty Uwiduhaye, one of the neighbours, says she last saw Muteteri on Monday of the previous week and suspects that was the day she died.
Though houses in the neighborhood are close to each other, Uwiduhaye did not hear any quarreling or fighting from the couples’ residence. With that, they did not take Muteteri’s temporary disappearance too seriously.
"The last time I saw her (on Monday), she was planting vegetables near the road. From then I did not see her alive again,” she says.
On the same day, Nzabarinda asked the neighbours to take care of the six-year-old child he had with Muteteri, telling them that his wife had traveled to Uganda to buy some merchandise and will be back.
Meanwhile, during those days, Muteteri’s adult daughter who lives outside Kigali was calling to check on her, but her phone was off. She called Nzabarinda who told her that Muteteri was in Uganda.
On Sunday – the day before the gruesome discovery of the couple’s death, the daughter called Nzabarinda again but this time, his phone was not going through too. She decided to travel to the place to know what was going on.
"When she reached this neighbourhood, she somehow feared to go to the house alone. She came and asked one of the women around here to escort her,” Uwiduhaye narrates.
The two went to the house and knocked but no one opened. They decided to engage the authorities. When the local leaders reached the house, they made a decision to break the window and look inside. The first sight into the house was quite horrific.
Nzabarinda’s body was hanging on a rope in the sitting room.
At this point, they decided to break the door and go into the house. Having entered, they were greeted by a swarm of flies coming from the bedroom. When they broke the bedroom door too, they found Muteteri’s body on the bed. It had started to rot, meaning she had died days earlier.
Marcel Nsenguwukuri, a shop attendant in the locality, told The New Times that the news of the death of the couple came as a shock because the husband and wife seemed peaceful.
"It was a shock for us. We never knew anything unusual about them. We would see them pass by; they were normal neighbours,” he noted.
The bodies of the couple have since been buried, but investigations are going on. RNP and Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) say they deployed forensic resources to establish the reason behind the death of the couple.