Ex-Rwandan leader gets life for genocide and rape

DAR ES SALAAM - A UN court has sentenced a Hutu extremist politician to life in prison for murder, genocide and crimes against humanity including 27 rapes perpetrated during Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

In the shortest ever trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the court sentenced Mika Muhimana after testimony from a series of witnesses who said they were raped by, or on the instructions of, the 44-year-old former municipal council leader.

One witness told the court in Arusha in northern Tanzania that Muhimana had once used a machete to rip the abdomen of a pregnant Tutsi woman and cut out the foetus. The baby cried beside its mother's corpse before it died.

In one instance the local leader raped a 15-year-old Tutsi girl in front of a group of Hutu militiamen, while in another, he banged the head of his victim on the floor while raping her, witnesses said.

Once after raping two women, Muhimana took them out of a building and invited people to look at their naked bodies.

"The chamber finds no mitigating circumstances and the chamber deems it appropriate to impose the maximum sentence," Roland Amoussouga, the tribunal's spokesman, said from Arusha.

"For genocide, he will serve for the rest of his life and the same for rape as a crime against humanity, and murder as a crime against humanity. The sentences will run concurrently."

Life in prison is the most severe penalty that can be handed down by the UN tribunal.

The court was set up in 1995 to try suspected masterminds of the Rwandan genocide when an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by extremist Hutus in 100 days in the tiny central African country.

In Muhimana's trial, which lasted only 34 trial days, his second wife told the tribunal that she married him because he saved her life. She is a Tutsi.

Many of the 19 prosecution witnesses were his victims. Defence lawyers arraigned 33 witnesses, mainly detainees from Rwandan prisons.

Muhimana was arrested in Tanzania's commercial capital of Dar es Salaam in 1999. His conviction is the second this year after that of Vincent Rutaganira, who pleaded guilty to involvement in the genocide in March and was handed six years.

It brings to 22 the number of people found guilty by the tribunal. Three have been acquitted and another 16 await trial.

The UN tribunal is keen to show progress in trying suspected leaders of the genocide to counter the Rwandan government's accusations of inefficiency.

- REUTERS