"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
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"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
A one-time Rwandan government official stood before a London court on Tuesday, accused of urging on the slaughter of Tutsis and directing six murders during the opening week of the 1994 genocide.
Vincent Brown, who previously went by the name Vincent Bajinya, becomes the first individual Britain has charged in connection with the killings, which claimed more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu lives across 100 days in a campaign driven by the Hutu ruling majority.
One count against Brown covers conduct ancillary to genocide in Kigali between April 6 and 13, 1994 — the week that opened the killings, following the missile strike that brought down the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira. Six further counts allege conduct ancillary to murder as a crime against humanity, on the basis that he gave orders for six deaths inside four days, among them a young mother and her infant son.
Now 65, Brown appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where prosecutor Jane Stansfield said he had been running the Department of Family Health inside Rwanda’s National Office of Population at the point the genocide started. Witnesses, his neighbors among them, describe him as “the leader and supervisor of physical acts of violence which were carried out by others”, she said.
Brown, resident in Britain for more than twenty years, rejects any role in the genocide, saying he departed Kigali in the middle of April 1994 and that his family left the country the following July. His lawyer, Sam Blom-Cooper, said the charges were welcome as a route to clearing his client’s name. “These are appalling crimes, terrible murders that were committed back in 1994,” he said. “But this, finally, does represent the beginning of the end for Dr Brown.”
Judge Paul Goldspring indicated he was prepared to release Brown on bail before his next hearing, set for the Old Bailey on October 9, provided he lodged an adequate sum as security. Prosecutors signaled an appeal against that ruling, which leaves Brown behind bars until a hearing later in the week.
Britain’s police War Crimes Team said on Monday that six more people remain under investigation, two of whom have been arrested on suspicion of genocide and crimes against humanity.
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