“Rwandan Genocide Fugitive Fulgens Kaishima Arrested in South Africa 29 Years After Massacre”

29 years ago and the most wanted person in one of the most violent massacres in the world, hidden from view, hiding in one of the farms, where he started a good life away from the thousands of victims that took his hands.

This is what happened to Fulgens Kaishima, one of the most wanted men in the Rwandan genocide.

Fulgens Kaishima (Reuters)

The man known as Donatien Nibasumba, who claimed to be a Burundian refugee, was working as a security guard on a farm in a town outside Cape Town on Wednesday night when he suddenly found himself surrounded by police in body armor and carrying guns.

Two foreign men (Kevin Hughes and Ewan Brown) who arrived with the police, who are members of an international tracking team pursuing war criminals, approached him and began to recite his rights, but they did not call him Nibasumba, but called him by his real name Fulgence Kayishema, the name of one of the most wanted in the world, an officer A former Rwandan police charged him with his involvement in one of the worst crimes ever, the 100-day genocide in Rwanda, where more than 2,000 Tutsis who had taken refuge in a church in April 1994 to hide from their Hutu attackers were massacred. .

The attackers set fire to the church after killing them, then toppled the structure on their heads with a bulldozer.

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However, the fleeing and shocked criminal denied at first that he was Donatian, that simple and beloved worker in the town of Paarl, South Africa, especially since he had previously saved a woman from the country’s population from an attack she was subjected to at the hands of some criminals, gaining everyone’s sympathy.

He also denied being able to speak English but relented when Hughes and Brown pointed out that they could easily bring someone from the farm to prove he was fluent in English. Then he imposed the matter of fact.

A picture of the wanted in the Rwanda massacre (AFP)

I waited so long

However, he insisted that he was not Kaishima, and did not acknowledge his true identity until the evening at the Cape Town police station. “I waited a long time to be arrested,” he told the police, according to the Guardian newspaper

One of the senior participants in his arrest confirmed: “I think he was traumatized by what happened that day, at that time and place… He did not imagine that something like this could happen.”

“He was stunned just to be in this situation, in his workplace suddenly surrounded by police,” he added.

It is noteworthy that the International Residual Mechanism for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Rwanda Genocide announced yesterday, Thursday, that Volgens was arrested Wednesday in Paarl, a small town about 30 miles east of Cape Town. She added that he was arrested in a joint operation carried out by the court’s fugitive tracking team and the South African authorities. She also explained that he allegedly orchestrated the killing of more than 2,000 ethnic Tutsi refugees – men, women and children – in a Catholic church during the period of genocide.

More than 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide over the course of three months in 1994, when groups of ethnic Hutus attacked the Tutsi minority and killed them, as well as the moderate Hutus who tried to protect them.

Then, in 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted Kaishima with genocide, complicity in genocide, and conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity, for murder and other crimes.

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