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| Rwanda Rearrests Hundreds of Freed Inmates |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 05/20/2003 |
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Rwanda has rearrested nearly 800 former prisoners who were freed earlier this year when officials tried to ease overcrowding in jails packed with genocide suspects, the Justice Ministry said recently. President Paul Kagame issued a decree in January that gave provisional liberty to more than 25,000 prisoners, mainly genocide suspects. Most of those released were sent on three-month rehabilitation programs. A Justice Ministry official said 787 had been rearrested because they were accused of new crimes, most relating back to the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed. 'We had fresh accusations of crimes they committed especially during the genocide to which they had apparently not confessed,' the head of judicial services at the ministry said. In the space of just 100 days, extremists of the Hutu majority, including senior government and military officers, organized the massacre of ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Nine years after the genocide, the country's prisons are overflowing with more than 100,000 suspects still awaiting trial and the legal system is unable to cope. Only ordinary Rwandans who took part in the killings were released under January's rehabilitation scheme while the masterminds of the genocide still face criminal proceedings. |
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