Rwanda seeks extradition of key genocide suspect from US

 Rwanda’s Prosecutor General Richard Muhumuza said Tuesday the country was sending a team of government lawyers to the United States to press the extradition of a genocide fugitive.

Leopold Munyakazi, the genocide suspect, was previously employed as French professor in the U.S. Goucher College and relieved of his duty for his alleged links to the 1994 killings and he has been since facing potential deportation.

Munyakazi is also listed as a “wanted” criminal on the Interpol website.

He was arrested in 2012 by the U.S. officials on Interpol’s arrest warranty, but was released on bail pending a hearing in a U.S. high court following Rwanda’s request for his extradition to face genocide charges.

Speaking a press briefing in Kigali on Tuesday, Muhumuza said that team of detectives and lawyers was being to liaise with the U.S. authorities to help strengthen the request for Munyakazi’s extradition through a an international arrest warrant over genocide charges.

Apart from genocide charges, the former college lecturer’s case comes on spotlight in 2006, after he gave a controversial speech to a faculty forum at the American University of Delaware, in which he argued that what happened in Rwanda had not been genocide because Hutus and Tutsis were not different ethnicities, and claimed that what happened should be considered part of a civil war.

Since 2005, the U.S. judiciary has extradited at least five Rwandan Genocide suspect wanted in their home country for orchestrating the killings of thousands of people during the 1994 genocide under an extradition agreement signed by the two countries in 2001.

UM– USEKE.RW