Genocide convict in hot water

Arusha. A former convict of the disbanded International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), who was arrested recently in Kagera Region by Immigration officers while attempting to cross into Burundi, has been taken to Dar es Salaam for further interrogations.

Immigration officer Abdallah Tiwo told The Citizen from Bukoba yesterday that the former captain of the Rwanda army is being questioned as to why he travelled out of Arusha without special travel documents.

He added that Innocent Sagahutu, who was arrested two weeks ago, was found without valid documents at the border with Burundi while trying to get into the neighbouring country from Ngara District.

He recently completed a 15-year jail sentence for his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda where about a million people were massacred after the killing of president Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.

He is among scores of the Rwanda nationals who were indicted by the ICTR and either served their jail terms or were acquitted but have not found a country to host them because they feared returning home.

For the past two weeks he had been held for interrogation in Bukoba but has now been transferred to the Immigration headquarters.

An Immigration officer in Bukoba told The Citizen last week that Sagahutu and other ex-convicts needed special clearance to travel out of Arusha. They are currently living in a special UN detention facility in Arusha.

However, when contacted by The Citizen, Sagahutu said the matter has been blown out of proportion because he had documents and was cleared by the UN offices in Tanzania to travel to Burundi to see his relatives.

He even claimed that he used the same clearance permits to travel to Mozambique and Switzerland recently “without any problem or causing harm to anybody”.