22 Dec 2011

Two sentenced to life in prison for Rwanda massacres

5:07 am on 22 December 2011

A UN war crimes court has sentenced two organisers of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 to life imprisonment.

Matthieu Ngirumpatse and Edouard Karemera were two senior members of Rwanda's former ruling party.

They were earlier convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

The ICTR ruled that Ngirumpatse and Karemera were part of a joint enterprise to exterminate Tutsis.

In 1994 around 800,000 people - mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group - were killed in just 100 days.

The ICTR was set up in the town of Arusha in Tanzania to put the ringleaders on trial.