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Suspect’s plea change important for prosecution’s strategy

    NAIROBI

    A senior ICTR prosecutor, Mohamed Othman, on Friday said that Georges Ruggiu’s change of plea to guilty was important both as a legal precedent and for the prosecution’s strategy, the independent Hirondelle news agency reported. “I think that people who volunteer to assist the prosecution in collaboration, coming forward to provide testimony and so forth, is something very useful in terms of evidential value,” Othman said. “We have recorded that testimony and of course we will use that in other trials,” he stated. According to the Internews service, Ruggiu, a former broadcaster and journalist of Rwanda’s Radio Television des Mille Collines (RTLM) who had originally pleaded not guilty to genocide charges in 1997, told the court on Monday that he could not pretend to be innocent of the deaths of people in 1994. “There was a link between what I had said [on air] and their being killed,” Ruggio stated. “I have no other choice then but to plead guilty,” he added.

    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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