Italy arrests Burundian over 2014 murder of three nuns

________________

ROME — Italian police have arrested a former member of Burundi's secret police for helping to organise the killing of three Italian nuns in Burundi in 2014, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Two nuns, aged 83 and 75, were killed on September 7, 2014. A third, aged 79, was killed and decapitated the following day, with her head left next to her body.

The Italian investigation was shelved twice because of a lack of information, but was reopened in 2024 after the publication of a book by an Italian journalist.

The arrested man, Guillaume Harushimana, was a "colleague" of General Adolphe Nshimirimana, a former head of the secret police who has since been assassinated, prosecutors said in a statement.

Harushimana was suspected of serving as an intermediary between the general and the killers and of providing them with the keys to the apartment in which the three nuns lived.

According to Italian authorities, the general ordered the killing because the nuns had refused to assist Burundian militias operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Burundian authorities had arrested a young man in the Kamenge district in the north of the economic capital Bujumbura where the convent was located shortly after the killings.

The man had mental health issues, and his arrest did not convince many in Burundi, particularly because of the large number of police officers present at the crime scene when the third nun was killed.

Nshimirimana was the right-hand man of then-president Pierre Nkurunziza, who launched a crackdown against regime opponents in 2015 that turned Burundi into a pariah state.