Belgium finds two guilty in Rwanda genocide case

BRUSSELS - A Belgian court has sentenced two Rwandan half-brothers to 10 and 12 years in prison for helping Hutu militias slaughter some 50,000 people during a 1994 genocide in their country that killed hundreds of thousands.

After 12 hours of deliberations jurors found the two men guilty of nearly all charges made against them.

Prosecutors had accused businessmen Etienne Nzabonimana and Samuel Ndashyikirwa of supplying militant Hutus with vehicles and weapons for their bloody rampages and plying them with beer after their killing sprees.

They were on Wednesday respectively sentenced to 12 and 10 years in prison.

Michele Hirsch, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, earlier expressed relief over the guilty verdict.

"What we witnessed was something really extraordinary," she told local RTBF radio.

"They (the plaintiffs) were mostly women because it was women who survived the genocide, because they were raped while the men were killed."

The pair, successful businessmen in their home towns of Kibungo and Kirwa in the country's southeast, were tried under a controversial law that empowers Belgium's courts to try war crimes suspects even if they are not Belgian and their crimes were committed abroad.

Suspects must be resident in Belgium, Rwanda's colonial master before the African country gained independence in 1962.

This is the second trial under the law, following a high-profile case in 2001 in which four Rwandans, including two nuns, were convicted for their role in their country's genocide.

Rwanda is still recovering from the three-month bloodbath that wiped out an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus from a population of about 8 million.

Courts have taken more than 10 years to bring perpetrators of the genocide to justice.

On Tuesday, Canada's courts upheld a ruling for the deportation of a Rwandan refugee who faces charges of crimes against humanity. In France, another Rwandan, a former United Nations Development Programme worker, might stand trial for similar crimes.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania has put on trial interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, four ministers and other high-ranking government officials suspected of being involved in the genocide.

- REUTERS