A preliminary investigation for genocide and crimes against humanity was opened at the end of July by French justice against a former Rwandan gendarme suspected of having participated in the 1994 genocide, we learned Thursday from sources close to the investigation and folder.
The investigations, revealed by Mediapart, are carried out by the crimes against humanity unit of the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) and entrusted to the gendarmes of the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Against Humanity (OCLCH).
They target the offenses of genocide and complicity, crimes against humanity and complicity, as well as participation in an agreement with a view to the commission of these crimes, the source close to the case told AFP.
Jean-Marie Vianney Nzapfakumunsi, 71, is notably accused by witnesses of having distributed weapons which were used in the massacre in April 1994 of nearly 2,000 Tutsis refugees in a church in Nyange, in the Kibuye region (western Rwanda). ).
An accusation that he firmly rejected in 2009 before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), according to the transcript of his testimony consulted by AFP.
The investigation must in particular make it possible
to “verify”
the
“facts attributed to it by certain witnesses”
, underlined the source close to the file.
Refusal of asylum due to suspicion
Passed through the national gendarmerie officer school in Melun (Seine-et-Marne) between 1979 and 1980, he also graduated from the Paris Institute of Criminology where he studied from 2000 to 2004, again according to his testimony before the ICTR.
Arriving in France in 1997, he was initially refused asylum by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), which suspected him of having played a role in the genocide, before obtaining his refugee status on appeal before the Refugee Appeals Commission (formerly the National Court of Asylum, editor's note), according to Mediapart.
Jean-Marie Vianney Nzapfakumunsi obtained French nationality in 2004. To date, he
“probably”
lives in France, according to the source close to the case.
In total, seven men have already been sentenced in France to sentences ranging from fourteen years of criminal imprisonment to life for their participation in the genocide, which left 800,000 dead, the majority belonging to the Tutsi ethnic group, according to the UN.
The latest, the former Rwandan doctor Sosthène Munyemana, was sentenced on December 20 to twenty-four years of criminal imprisonment.
Two of them must still be tried on appeal, and another, the former Rwandan prefect Laurent Bucyibaruta, sentenced at first instance to twenty years in prison for complicity in genocide, died on December 6.