Most Wanted North America - Monday, May 19, 2008 7:10 - 0 Comments

Five top genocide suspects are living free in Canada

JEFF HORWITZ
Special to The Gazette

BUTARE, Rwanda — Some of the men in the dusty yard of Butare Central Prison
remember Pierre Célestin Halindintwali as a schoolmate or party guest. But more
often, he’s recalled as the man who hid bodies.

During Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, inmates here say, the then-director of Butare’s
public works department allegedly donned a camouflage jacket and devoted his
department’s fleet of Caterpillar tractors to digging Butare’s mass graves.
According to one prisoner’s account, he also helped fill them.

Joseph Nzabirinda, a Hutu chauffeur, was giving a Tutsi friend a ride on
April 21, 1994, when armed men stopped his car at a roadblock.

Halindintwali worked down the street from Nzabirinda, the chauffeur says,
and was easy to recognize among the crowd.

Also present was Désiré Munyaneza, the son of a prominent local businessman,
Nzabirinda says.

Halindintwali stabbed his passenger to death, Nzabirinda says, because the man
refused to hand over his identity card. When a truckload of Tutsi refugees
arrived, Halindintwali’s compatriots took their cue.

“They took the Tutsi refugees one by one from the truck and killed them with
machetes and clubs studded with nails,” says Nzabirinda, who estimates that he
and a small group of observers watched 40 people die that day. “We refused (to
help) and they sent us away, telling us we were not men.” Halindintwali has
been charged with participation in the Hutu government-led genocide in the
spring and summer of 1994, when Rwanda’s majority Hutu population massacred
more than 500,000 fellow citizens of minority Tutsi ethnicity. Continue…