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Former genocide suspect released from prison

    NAIROBI

    Former Rwandan General Leonidas Rusatira was released from St Gilles Prison in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday, a week after the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda dropped genocide charges against him, news organisations reported.

    "I am more determined that ever to fight for peace, justice, freedom and democracy. My internment will have been for me another way to be in communion with Rwandans who have suffered and whose hopes I share for a new era of peace and concord," he said in a statement made after spending three months in custody.

    Now that he was free, he added, he would be able to fight against hate, division, injustice and all sorts of exclusion that had produced "the ideology of genocide" that had decimated the Rwandan people.

    The ICTR dropped genocide charges against Rusatira, 58, for lack of evidence on 15 August and ordered his immediate release. He was a one-time secretary-general to the Rwandan Cabinet, and was commandant of the High Military School during the 1994 genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.

    This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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