Belgian court rejects appeals of genocide convicts

Belgian's final court of appeal, the Cour de Cassation, rejected on Wednesday the appeals for a retrial by a Rwandan businessman and two Rwandan nuns sentenced to prison in Brussels on 8 June 2001 for war crimes committed during the 1994 genocide.

Lawyers for convicts had appealed claiming irregularities in the original trial. However, the appeal court confirmed the sentence of 20 years imprisonment for Alphonse Higaniro, 52, a former minister and director of a match factory; 15 years for Consolata Mukangango, 42, also known as Sister Gertrude; 12 years for Julienne Mukabutera, 36, known as Sister Maria Kizito. Both nuns are from the Benedictine convent in Sovu, Butare Prefecture, Rwanda.

The fourth convicted, Vincent Ntezimana, 39, is a former professor at Butare University. He was given a 12-year sentence but did not appeal.

The trial of the "Butare Four" was described as "historic", because it was the first under a 1993 law in which defendants were judged in Belgium courts for war crimes and human rights violations committed by foreigners outside Belgium. All four originate from Butare in southern Rwanda, where their crimes were committed, and have been living in Belgium since the 1994 genocide, in which at least 900,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.

"It's a fundamental judgement that makes the trial historic," one of the lawyers of the victims said. "We are now waiting for other trials in Belgium and elsewhere, for which investigations are continuing."

Currently, a Belgian investigative magistrate, Damien Vandermeersch, is in Rwanda in connection with the killings of four Belgians in 1994. Three of the dead were aid workers - Olivier Dulieu, Christine Andre and Antoine Godfriaux - slain in Rambura (about 150 km from Kigali) on 7 April 1994. Their families suspect that they were killed because they had been informed about funds embezzled from the Belgian foreign aid office.

Vandermeersch, accompanied by a deputy prosecutor and two police detectives, will also seek information on the deaths of another Belgian and two Rwandans in Kigali on the same date, in response to complaints made by Belgian citizens.