The Court of Appeal will on Friday, February 17 deliver a verdict in the appeal case of Ladislas Ntaganzwa. The 60-year-old, a former Mayor (Bourgmestre) of Nyakizu Commune (now part of Nyaruguru District) who was previously found guilty of committing crimes including genocide, as well as rape and murder plus crimes against humanity. ALSO READ: Ladislas Ntaganzwa’s appeal trial set for Monday Among other things, he was pinned on being at the helm of the April 15, 1994 attacks against the Tutsi who had sought refuge at Cyahinda Catholic Parish in Nyakizu Commune, where many lives perished. Since December last year, Ntaganzwa has been in court challenging the life sentence handed to him by the High Court Chamber for International Crimes (HCCIC) in 2020 for his role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. ALSO READ: Ladislas Ntaganzwa gets life sentence for Genocide crimes Witnesses told the HCCIC during the first instance trial that Ntaganzwa brought the Gendermaine (Policemen) from Butare to Cyahinda and ordered them to shoot Tutsi civilians who were gathered at the Catholic Parish. They did this in partnership with the Interahamwe and Burundian refugees in the killing. Ntaganzwa’s appeal plea is based on several factors, prominent of which is the claim that the witness' accounts that were used against him during the first instance trial were not legitimate. ALSO READ: Genocide suspect Ntaganzwa extradited from DR Congo For instance, he said that the witnesses who testified that they saw him in the Cyahinda attacks contradicted each other concerning the type of clothes he was dressed in, with some saying he was donned in military fatigue while others said he was dressed in civilian clothes. However, during the hearing that took place last month, Prosecutor Faustin Nkusi said the way Ntaganzwa was dressed on that day was something very trivial that witnesses can forget after twenty years. Nkusi noted that what matters is the fact that there is enough evidence that pins Ntaganzwa to having been at the scene, including the fact that Ntaganzwa himself admitted that he was there. Ntaganzwa was arrested in 2015 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and extradited to Rwanda in 2016. He was one of the nine people indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but had not yet been arrested by the time the UN court closed shop in 2015. In 2012, the ICTR, as part of its completion strategy, decided to refer to the Rwandan prosecution the case files of six of the nine major suspects who had remained at large.
