A Rwandan doctor gets 24-year prison sentence in France for his role in the 1994 genocide

PARIS (AP) — A Rwandan doctor was sentenced by a Paris court on Wednesday to 24 years in prison for his role in the 1994 genocide in his home country.

Sosthene Munyemana, 68, was found guilty of charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and helping prepare a genocide.

His lawyers said that he would appeal the decision. Munyemana has never been detained, remaining free throughout the trial. He won’t go to prison while an appeal is ongoing.

Munyemana, who moved to France months after the genocide and quickly raised suspicions among Rwandans living there, has denied wrongdoing.

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The verdict comes nearly three decades after the genocide, in which more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to protect them were killed.

At the time, Munyemana was a 38-year-old gynecologist in Tumba, in the southern university district of Butare.

He has been accused of co-signing in April 1994 “a motion of support” for the interim government that supervised the genocide and of participating in a local committee and meetings that organized roundups of Tutsi civilians.

Munyemana was then a friend of Jean Kambanda, head of the interim government.

He acknowledged participating in local night patrols, which were organized to track Tutsi people, but he said that he did it to protect the local population. Witnesses saw him at checkpoints set up across the town where he supervised operations, according to prosecutors.

Munyemana was also accused of detaining several dozen Tutsi civilians in the office of the local administration that was “under his authority at the time,” and of relaying “instructions from the authorities to the local militia and residents leading to the roundup of the Tutsis,” among other things.

Prosecutors said there was evidence of “intentional gathering meant to exterminate people,” and that Munyemana “couldn’t ignore” that they were going to be killed.

Munyemana arrived in September 1994 in France, where he has been living and working until he recently retired. Members of the Rwandan community in France first filed a complaint against him in 1995.

In recent years as relations improved with Rwanda, which has long accused France of “enabling” the genocide, France has increased efforts to arrest genocide suspects and send them to trial.

This was the sixth case related to the Rwandan genocide that came to court in Paris, all of them in the past decade.