On 24 October, General Wilson Gumisiriza and Major Wilson Ukwishaka were acquitted while Captains John Butera and Dieudonné Rukeba were each sentenced to eight years in prison.
Both, prosecution and convicted had appealed.
On 28 January, the Military Prosecutor, Captain Ngabo Kayijuka, requested that the appeals court judges sentence the two senior officers and increase the jail sentence handed to the two captains.
For their part, General Gumisiriza and Major Ukwishaka had, as in first instance, affirmed that they did not know that their men were going to kill these clergymen.
The two captains, who acknowledged their role in the murders, as for them, had asked the judges to reduce their sentence.
Among the clergymen who were killed - almost all Hutus - were the Archbishop of Kigali, Vincent Nsengiyumva, the Bishop of Byumba (northern Rwanda) Joseph Ruzindana, and the Bishop of Kabgayi (central Rwanda) Thaddée Nsengiyumva, then president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Rwanda.
The four soldiers were at the time members of the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the former rebellion currently in power in Kigali) which put an end to the genocide in July 1994.
They were arrested on 11 June 2008, after, according to the Rwandan army, joint investigations by Rwandan Prosecutor General and Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), headquartered in Arusha, Tanzania.
SRE/ER/MM/SC
© Hirondelle News Agency
