Radicals call for Italy to extradite priest

Members of Italy’s Radical party at the weekend urged the government to extradite a Rwandan priest, Reverend Athanase Seromba, accused in the 1994 Rwandan genocide to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Associated Press reported. It quoted party secretary, Daniele Capezzone, who spoke to journalists, as calling on the centre-right government to alter its legislation to allow for the arrest and extradition of Seromba. The Tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, last month said that she was “stupefied” by Italy’s refusal to cooperate and rejected its claims that there was no provision in national legislation to carry out the rest, AP said. She noted that domestic law were no barrier to executing tribunal warrants. Seromba left Rwanda for Italy in 1994.

A 1999 African rights report accused him of helping orchestrate the massacre of some 2,000 Tutsi refugees at his parish in Nyange, Rwanda in April 1994. Seromba has said that he had already left Nyange when the killing began. He reportedly left his work at the Florence archdiocese as a priest last month, to avoid the media following Del Ponte’s remarks. He had been working in the archdiocese since 1997. Neither Italian officials nor the Vatican have commented on the case, but a spokesman for the archdiocese said that the allegations against Seromba were part of a Tutsi-linked campaign against Hutus in the Rwandan Catholic church, AP said. Amnesty International has called on Italy to arrest Seromba.