A Dutch investigating judge, two court registrars, a representative of the prosecution and a defence lawyer have been in Kigali since March 15th, hearing testimony from 30 witnesses in the appeals case of convicted torturer Joseph Mpambara.

By Thijs Bouwknegt

A district court in The Hague last year sentenced Mpambara to 20 years imprisonment for torture committed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He immediately lodged an appeal.

The former Interahamwe militiaman was convicted for ordering the torture that resulted in the death of two Tutsi mothers and their four children in April 1994. Mpambara stopped an ambulance in which the wounded victims were being transported at a roadblock in Mugonero, in the Kibuye region in western Rwanda. On his orders the women and children were “beaten with clubs and hacked with machetes”, the ruling said.

Mpambara was also found guilty of the detaining a German-Rwandan couple and their baby. He threatened the woman, saying he would kill her in front of her husband and child. However, he was acquitted of killing Tutsis who fled to the Seventh-Day Adventist church complex in Mugonero and the rape of four women, three of whom were later killed.

He applied for political asylum in the Netherlands in 1998 but was denied protected status as Dutch authorities suspected him, as a member of the Interahamwe militia, of having been involved in the Rwandan massacres.

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