Sunday Times
Vatican, May 18: The Vatican has come under renewed pressure to purge its ranks of suspected killers after a second Rwandan Catholic priest accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide was found to be working in Italy under an assumed name.
An international arrest warrant is being prepared by Rwanda for Father Emmanuel Uwayezu following the discovery that he is working in a parish at Empoli, near Florence. It will accuse him of direct complicity in the massacre of more than 80 students, aged from 12 to 20, at a Catholic school where he was headmaster.
One of the few survivors lives in Britain. She still has nightmares and is too afraid to be identified by name. Last week she identified Uwayezu and described how he brought soldiers to the school at Kibeho and conspired with them to have the Tutsi students killed.
“He seemed to be happy with what he was doing. He told us to stay in the classroom. Some people who were working in the kitchen were shot in front of his eyes but he did not say a word. Others were hacked to death, raped or buried alive,” she said. “Now Uwayezu is enjoying his life. Is he really a father (priest)?”
Uwayezu denied taking part in the genocide and said he had tried to save the students. He said their deaths still haunted him. He is a Hutu like another notorious Rwandan priest, Athanase Seromba, who joined the campaign to exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsi minority and who also ended up in Florence.
After the genocide they both escaped to Italy with the help of Catholic supporters and began new lives as priests with the approval of Florence’s archbishop. Seromba, who was found in Italy by the Sunday Times, is serving a life sentence after being convicted of slaughtering 2,000 of his parishioners by bulldozing his church as they cowered inside. He was the first priest to be tried by a UN war crimes tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity.
For a long time the Vatican had proclaimed his innocence. It also questioned the objectivity of a Belgian court that had given two Rwandan Benedictine nuns long jail sentences for genocide.