Ex-soldier charged with 1999 murder of tourists

A Rwandan national has been charged in a Ugandan court with the 1999 murder of eight foreign tourists in a gorilla national park in southwestern Uganda, court sources have confirmed. "Jean Paul Bizimana, aged 30 years, also known as Xavier Van-Ndame, was charged with nine counts of murdering two Americans, four Britons, two New Zealanders and a Ugandan. He was not allowed to enter any plea and was remanded until 2 August when his case returns for mention," an official at Kampala’s magistrate’s court told IRIN in an interview on 16 July. The official explained that all the counts were capital offences only triable by the High Court and subject to the death penalty. He said the magistrate’s court had no jurisdiction to listen to Bizimana’s plea and could only read to him the charges before remanding him to Luzira maximum security prison near the capital, Kampala. Bizimana was a soldier during the government of the Rwandan former president, the late Juvenal Habyarimana, and had been arrested by the Ugandan security service a week earlier, according to the Criminal Investigation Department chief, Elizabeth Kuteesa. On 1 March 1999, attackers estimated to have numbered between 100 and 150 and believed to have been Rwandan Hutu militias known as the Interahamwe, attacked unarmed tourists and their guides at Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in southwestern Uganda, a sanctuary for rare mountain gorillas. The prosecution alleges that Bizimana and others still at large kidnapped the tourists. Fourteen of them were taken hostage at a camp site on the edge of Bwindi, the starting point for visitors hoping to track the world’s remaining rare mountain gorillas. Their Ugandan game warden was burnt to death, and they were marched through the dense thicket of the mountainous forest towards the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After releasing some of the hostages, the attackers used machetes to kill eight people, leaving their bodies in the forest. The Interahamwe are Hutu militiamen who have been accused of largely being responsible for the 1994 genocide in which up to 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed, according to Rwandan government figures. Most of them fled to the DRC after the genocide. They are reported to have targeted Anglophones, especially Britons and Americans, whose governments they accused of supporting the Rwandan successor government. The United States government offered a US $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderers of their two nationals. Three other suspects, Leonidas Bimenyiamana, 34, Francois Karake, 38, and Gregoire Nyaminami, 32, all Rwandan nationals, were in March 2003 charged in a US court with murder, conspiracy and other counts over the killing of the two Americans.