April 27, 1999
Kigali, Rwanda - A Rwandan court acquitted a former government official accused of playing a role in the 1994 genocide of more than half a million people, state-run Radio Rwanda reported Tuesday.
In a rare ruling, the criminal court in Kibuye, 90 miles west of Kigali, cleared former deputy governor Ignace Banyaga of charges he helped kill thousands of minority Tutsis seeking shelter at a local church and a soccer stadium in April 1994.
The killings, on the orders of the former Hutu extremist government, ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front won power and defeated the Hutu fighters in July 1994.
The ruling surprised many genocide survivors, Radio Rwanda said. The prosecution had requested the death penalty for Banyaga, who served under Clement Kayishema, the former governor of Kibuye who is standing trial at the U.N. tribunal for Rwanda in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.
Rwandan prisons are jammed with 125,000 genocide suspects; 1,300 of them have been tried so far. Twenty-two were executed by a firing squad last year and more than 200 are on death row.
The Rwandan League for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights said more than 2,000 suspects, whose files have been lost or misplaced, have been freed since October 1998.
The United Nations has been conducting separate trials in Arusha, where the maximum penalty is life in prison.
