After a request for medical assistance in Britain remained ignored, a former lieutenant colonel Tharcisse Muvunyi who was convicted of instigating genocide in Rwanda in 1994 passed away in Niger, according to his lawyer on Saturday.
Tharcisse Muvunyi served in the Rwandan army during the 100-day massacre of more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates by the country’s Hutu majority extremists.
He was detained in the UK, given a 15-year prison term in 2010, and released two years later after serving his sentence.
“Yesterday afternoon Muvunyi was found dead in the shower by one of his housemates,” Muvunyi’s lawyer Abbe Jolles told reporters.
When Muvunyi was released from prison in Tanzania in 2012, he relocated into a safe house there. In 2021, he and seven other people who had been tried for their parts in the genocide moved to Niger.
He’d been ill for some weeks. He was discovered unconscious at home on May 6 and rushed to the hospital for incomplete brain scans. On May 10, he was let go.