25 June 2010
Jean Leonard Rugambage
Shooting
A journalist working for a private newspaper has been shot dead in front of his house in the Rwandan capital.
Witnesses say Jean Leonard Rugambage, the acting editor of Umuvugizi newspaper, was fired on by two men who then fled in a car. The authorities had recently suspended the paper, prompting it to start publishing online instead. The paper's exiled chief editor has blamed the government. Editor Jean Bosco Gasasira, who fled to Uganda in April after his paper was suspended, said the Kigali government had master-minded the assassination of Mr Rugambage who died in hospital after the shooting.
"I'm 100% sure it was the office of the national security services which shot him dead," he told Voice of America.
Mr Gasasira said it was because of an article published on the Umuvugizi website relating to the attempted killing last weekend of former army chief Lt Gen Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa. Rwanda has denied accusations it was behind the shooting of Lt Gen Nyamwasa. Police said they had arrested two men and one of them admitted killing the journalist. Internal Security Minister Moussa Fazil Harelimana said the man had told police he killed Rugambage in revenge because the journalists had killed his brother in the 1994 Tutsi genocide. Rugambage was acquitted in 2006 by a grass-roots court of participating in the genocide.
