Antonia Locatelli

The stone commemorating Antonia Locatelli in the Garden of the Righteous, Warsaw. Antonia Locatelli (16 November 1937 – 10 March 1992) was an Italian Roman Catholic missionary educator who had lived in Rwanda since the early 1970s.

In March 1992, she witnessed massacres of the Tutsis taking place in the Bugesera region, south of Kigali. In an attempt to save 300 to 400 Tutsis, she phoned the Belgian embassy, French RFI Radio and the BBC.

Death On the night between 9 and 10 March 1992, she was gunned down by a group of presidential guards who had arrived from Kigali.

Her murder was announcend on RFI the next morning:

Antonia Locatelli is buried in Nyamata, near the church in which, during the Rwandan genocide two years later, ten thousand Tutsis were massacred.

During the commemoration ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide (Kigali, April 7, 2019), Paul Kagame paid tribute to Antonia in his opening speech: