Former president gets15-year prison term

A Rwandan court sentenced the country's former president, Pasteur Bizimungu, to 15 years in prison on Monday for embezzling state funds, disseminating literature to incite public violence and forming a militia group that threatened state security. "The court finds Bizimungu guilty of three charges," Fred Mulindwa, the president of the Court of First Instance in Kigali, said. Each charge carried a maximum sentence of five years. Bizimungu's former minister and close ally, Charles Ntakirutinka, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, Bizimungu was acquitted of the charge of illegally possessing a firearm. The court also ordered that government refund him the US $10,000 confiscated during his arrest. Bizimungu’s trial started in April after nearly one-and-a-half years in detention but the prosecution accused him of deliberately stalling his trial by filing appeals for the dismissal of the charges and for bail. The trial was marked by chaos reaching its peak when a judge detained Bizimungu's lawyer for 48 hours for disrupting court proceedings. In addition, during one of the proceedings, a key prosecution witness recounted how police intimidated him into signing a statement alleging that Bizimungu was recruiting a private militia. Bizimungu’s lawyers said they might appeal the verdict. Bizimungu, a Hutu, was seen as a symbol of reconciliation in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide in which Hutu militias and soldiers killed at least 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a 100 days, according to the government. In 1990, Bizimungu had rallied to the mainly Tutsi rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Paul Kagame, which seized Kigali and routed the genocidal forces in July 1994.