By FELLY KIMENYI
The New Times

The office of the Prosecutor General is to petition the US government to arrest Leopold Munyakazi, a fugitive genocide suspect. Munyakazi fled Rwanda after jumping bail two years ago.

Emmanuel Rukangira, the Prosecutor who heads the Genocide fugitives tracking team, said on phone, Friday that Munyakazi, who in a recent public lecture in the United States denied there was genocide in Rwanda in 1994, had been detained...

and released temporarily. “I refer to it as civil war, not genocide; it was about political power. Ethnicity is not really understood about Rwanda; in Rwanda there are no tribes, there are social groups, they are one single people,” Munyakazi said during a faculty forum at the University of Delaware on October 25.

But Rukangira said that Munyakazi, a former lecturer at the Kigali Education Institute (KIE), is a genocide revisionist who is accused of conniving with notorious Ex-FAR officers to incite killings during the genocide.

“It is sad to hear that from a so-called scholar who was here during the massacres; in fact despite claiming he is innocent, we have strong evidence linking him to killings in Kigali city and the former Gitarama province,” Rukangira said.

He added: “We are working on his indictment because his name features in different Gacaca sessions both in Kigali and in the Southern province; we will soon send it to the US judicial authorities and we will ask the FBI to come and carry out the investigations.”

Munyakazi, who said that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was a civil war and not genocide, remained in the US after attending a conference two years ago and has since been joined by his wife.

He is currently an Assistant Lecturer of French at Montclair State University in New Jersey, US. “We are optimistic the US will respond positively towards the indictments because they have cooperated in various cases; so we think he will be apprehended,” Rukangira said.