the two former bourgmestres remain on life sentence on appeal

Tutsi ethnic group "

concerted plan for destruction"

The verdict was greeted in heavy silence, barely disturbed by the discreet sobs of the family of the accused. The two former burgomasters remained stoic, quickly surrounded by their lawyers. They have five days to form a possible appeal in cassation.

"This decision is right and it is a message: stop impunity for all those who took part in the genocide and who believed to be able to take refuge in France. this, "reacted Alain Gauthier, president of an association at the origin of most French investigations into the Rwandan genocide.

This is the second time that the French justice, which tried these men under its universal jurisdiction for the most serious crimes, pronounces in a file related to the Rwandan genocide, after the condemnation of the former captain of the army Pascal Simbikamgwa to 25 years of criminal imprisonment.

Genocide between neighbors …

More than eight weeks of hearings revealed genocide among neighbors, on the hills where the inhabitants once participated together in community work. As elsewhere in Rwanda, where the killings began shortly after the attack on Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994, massacres and summary executions followed in Kabarondo.

During the trial, the prosecution designated Octavien Ngenzi and Tito Barahira as "artisans of death" having "full authority" in their village, essential cogs of the genocide in their commune of Kabarondo. A security period of 22 years – which was not granted – was also requested for Ngenzi, burgomaster in office in 1994 and as such "responsible for all the deaths of the town" .

The two men, who succeeded each other at the head of the commune from 1976 to 94, denied to the very end any participation in the killings in Kabarondo, where the worst of the massacres took place on April 13 in the church. Nearly 2,000 dead, according to the abbot, mortar-shelled and then cut with a machete, for nearly seven hours.

For this trial on appeal, the former mayors had changed lawyers, hoping this time to convince that they had "no blood on their hands" . "I was the bourgmestre and I did not do enough" but "never did I kill" Octavien Ngenzi had said in his last words to the court. "I did not kill, I did not 'sort' the Tutsi" had pleaded a sickened Barahira Tito, on dialysis for years.

Men "without authority" or active in "genocidal dynamics"?

The defense depicted prominent "unauthorized" caught in the turmoil of April 1994 killings that no one was able to arrest in Rwanda and who made more than 800,000 deaths in 100 days, according to the UN . Men who are not "not heroes" but "not criminals so far" . "Convenient" in 19459002 "collective account" of the village.
But it is the account of the prosecution that convinced the court.

The public prosecutor's office described two men having "accumulated privileges and patrimony" and who are "gone 'at the end of the genocidal logic' to retain their advantages. A Ngenzi who kept his "full authority" wounded as "an eel" and ended up "directing" the killers; a Barahira still "fears" who "harangues the killers" to which he mixes willingly.

For the general lawyer Aurélie Belliot, "Octavien Ngenzi explains that he is doing everything in his power to protect his constituents, but his actions have largely contributed to the genocidal dynamic ". As for Barahira, several witnesses accuse him of having participated, armed with a spear, in the sorting of the surviving refugees of the church, where all the Tutsi were completed.

In France, about twenty files related to the genocide Rwandans are still on trial, awaiting trial.