New York, US - The UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Thursday convicted Gregoire Ndahimana, former mayor of Kivumu commune in Kibuye prefecture in Rwanda, of genocide and extermination and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

In a statement on its verdict, the tribunal ruled that, the former mayor committed the crime of extermination by 'aiding and abetting as well as by virtue of his command responsibility over communal police in Kivumu'.

It, however, stated that a count of complicity to genocide was dismissed.

It said that the tribunal, which is based in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, ordered that its sentence against Ndahimana supersede any other imposed on the accused by any other State or institution, and that he receives credit for time served since his arrest on 11 August 2009.

The ICTR was set up to try those most responsible for the 1994 genocide that engulfed Rwanda.

The statement noted that majority of the trial chamber’s three-judge panel found, as a mitigating factor, that the scale of the operation that led to the destruction of a church and the killing of thousands of ethnic Tutsi civilians, reflected broad coordination among various groups, local religious authorities, as well as civilian assailants.

'Though this did in no way exonerate the accused, it did, however, suggest that his participation through aiding and abetting may have resulted from duress rather that from extremist or ethnic hatred,” it quoted the judges as saying in their ruling.

Ndahimana was arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and transferred to the UN Detention Facility in Arusha on 26 August 2009.

He was born in Kivumu commune in 1952.

At least 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate ethnic Hutus were killed during the three months of bloodletting that followed the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana when his plane was brought down over the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on 6 April 1994.

Pana 18/11/2011