25.11.09 - RWANDA/CANADA - CANADA CHARGES ANOTHER RWANDA GENOCIDE SUSPECT

Arusha, November 25, 2009 (FH) - After nearly six years investigation, Canadian security officials have arrested a Rwandan suspected of the 1994 genocide.

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The 37-year-old Rwandan immigrant, Jacques Mungwarere, becomes the second person to be charged under Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, which came into force in 2000, according to the Canadian press reports.

Mungwarere, a former school teacher who has been hiding in the North American country, was arrested in his home in Windsor, Ontario, following cooperation between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Rwanda's Genocide Fugitive Tracking Unit (GFTU).

It is alleged that Mungwarere committed genocide in Kibuye, western Rwanda, where approximately 2,000 fleeing Tutsi women and children were locked up in the church and later a bulldozer was ordered to demolish the church. All those inside the church were trapped to death.

It is also alleged that Mungwarere was the first person to make public the theory of killing ethnic Tutsis and throwing them into Nyabaronga River, a tributary of River Nile which would make it easy for them [Tutsis] to flow to Ethiopia from where, he said, they originated.

The arrest comes barely a month after a Canadian court slapped a life sentence on another genocide suspect Desire Munyaneza, for his role in the Genocide against mainly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

SC/GF