Arab News | British man ‘supervisor’ of violence in Rwandan genocide, UK court hears

LONDON: A British-Rwandan man on Tuesday became the first person to appear in a UK court charged with involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Vincent Brown, 65, is accused of being an ancillary to genocide and aiding crimes against humanity.

He was a “party” to six murders in Kigali in April 1994, prosecutors told a London court.

Brown, who worked as a doctor at the time, was “a leader or supervisor of physical acts of violence which were carried out by others”, said prosecutor Jane Stansfield.

The victims were three members of the same household, a local taxi driver, a young woman and her baby, she said.

Brown, formerly known as Vincent Bajinya, spoke to confirm his name, date of birth and address.

He did not enter a plea, but his lawyer Sam Blom-Cooper told the court that Brown wanted to clear his name.

Several other countries have previously prosecuted suspects in the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were beaten, shot, or hacked to death in 100 days of slaughter.

Brown, the first to be prosecuted in Britain, arrived in the country in 2000 after living in Kigali and became a British citizen in 2005, the court heard.

He was first arrested in 2006, but after a protracted process his extradition to Rwanda was finally refused by a British court in 2017.

The Rwandan government then asked the UK government to investigate the allegations.

The genocide followed years of tension between ethnic Hutu and Tutsi populations and was triggered by the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose private plane was hit by two missiles.

Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring granted Brown bail on condition that his family pay £25,000 ($33,000) security.

Due to the seriousness of the allegations, he transferred the case to the Central Criminal Court, also known as the Old Bailey, where Brown is due to appear on October 9.