Bernard Ntuyahaga

Major Bernard Ntuyahaga (probably born in 1952) is a Rwandan army officer convicted by a Belgian court for the murders of ten United Nations peacekeepers at the start of the Rwandan Genocide. He was released in 2018 and returned against his will to Rwanda.

Military career Bernard Ntuyahaga was born in Mabanza, Kibuye Prefecture in the Belgian mandate of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda). He was an ethnic Hutu. In 1972, he went to the army officer's school in Kigali. At the time of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he held the rank of major in the Rwandan Armed Forces.

On 7 April 1994, the day after the assassinations of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, the house of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, which was under the protection of fifteen peacekeepers under the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), was surrounded by soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces. After the five Ghanaian and ten Belgian peacekeepers were disarmed, the Ghanaians were released and Madame Agathe and her husband were murdered.

A Belgian court later found that Ntuyahaga had transported the ten Belgian prisoners, all members of the 2nd Commando Battalion, to the military camp in Kigali where they were subsequently killed by fellow Rwandan soldiers. He was further found to have murdered an undetermined number of Rwandan civilians during the genocide and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Legal process

In June 1998, Ntuyahaga surrendered himself to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. In September of that year, the ICTR issued an indictment charging him with: conspiracy to commit genocide; genocide or complicity in genocide; war crimes; and two counts of crimes against humanity. Ntuyahaga pleaded not guilty. and Tanzania adjusting its charges against Ntuyahaga to fall under its extradition treaty with Rwanda.

This eventually ended when Tanzania denied Rwanda's request for extradition in favor of Belgium. In March 2004, Ntuyahaga, of his own free will, flew to Belgium, accompanied by a Belgian diplomat. There, he gave himself up and was put in prison on remand. He was charged with:

Handing over the Belgian soldiers to the Rwandan soldiers in the Kigali military camp of which he was an officer, without taking any measures to prevent their massacre; of celebrating with the soldiers implicated in the massacres of the Kigali Tutsi civilian population, and of allowing these soldiers to use his residence as the headquarters.

In December 2018, Ntuyahaga was extradited to Rwanda.

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