October 22, 2001
A former Rwandan governor living in neighboring Kenya has been arrested and handed over to the U.N. tribunal hearing cases related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, court officials said Monday.
Francois Karera, the 62-year-old former governor of Kigali state, an area outside Rwanda's capital, was arrested Saturday in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, said Kingsley Moghalu, a spokesman for the Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Karera was immediately flown to the court's detention facility and will ``soon'' make his first appearance before the tribunal, Moghalu said.
He faces charges of genocide and extermination for his alleged role in the massacres that took place between April and July of 1994, when more than 500,000 people were killed.
Karera, a Hutu, is believed to have played a major role in carrying out the mass slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, including many living in the state he governed.
``The campaign consisted of encouraging Hutu civilians to separate themselves from their Tutsi neighbors and to kill them,'' said Moghalu.
Karera is also accused of organizing attacks on Tutsis who had taken refuge in churches.
As the then-rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front moved on Kigali, the capital, in June 1994, Karera and other leaders who orchestrated the genocide fled west to what was then Zaire, now Congo. He later moved to Nairobi.
Including Karera, there are 53 genocide suspects in custody at the U.N. Detention Facility here.
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