Norway court jails Rwandan for 21 years for genocide

An Oslo court on Thursday sentenced a Rwandan man to 21 years in prison for his role in the massacres of more than 1,000 Tutsis in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Sadi Bugingo, a 47-year-old Hutu who has lived in Norway since 2002, was found guilty of being an accessory to genocide for ensuring that orders issued for the killings were carried out.

He did not face any charges of having carried out any killings himself.

The 21-year-sentence demanded by prosecutors is the maximum available in Norway.

The case centred on several events in April 1994: a massacre in a municipal building, another within the grounds of a Catholic church, and on several different occasions, the killing of people who had sought refuge in a hospital.

Bugingo, who had worked as a cleaner in Norway until his arrest in 2011, had pleaded not guilty when the trial opened last September, and his lawyer had called for his acquittal.

The trial was the first for genocide in the Scandinavian country.

The April 6, 1994 killing of Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana triggered a genocide in which 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority, were killed, according to UN figures. AFP