A South African inquest into the killing of the prominent Rwandan dissident Patrick Karegeya has opened in the suburbs of Johannesburg with a lawyer telling the court the former intelligence chief’s death was a political assassination.
“We are dealing with an assassination of a Rwandan citizen in this country,” said Gerrie Nel, the lawyer for AfriForum, a South African NGO representing minority interests and a group of local Rwandan exiles in the case. “We will be arguing that this assassination is intrinsically linked to the political situation in Rwanda.”
Karegeya, one of President Paul Kagame’s former closest aides and a former head of Rwanda’s external intelligence, died on New Year’s Eve 2013 after being invited to a room in the five-star Michelangelo hotel in Sandton, South Africa, by Apollo Kiririsi Gafaranga, a visiting Rwandan businessman and friend.
Karegeya, who was 53 at the time of the killing, had fled into exile seven years earlier after falling out with Kagame, his former boss. Members of the opposition group he set up in exile – the Rwanda National Congress (RNC) – claim a professional hit squad was sent from Rwanda to eliminate the former spy chief.
Human rights groups say Karegeya’s murder was only the most prominent of a series of murders, kidnappings, renditions and harassment targeted at Rwandan opposition members, social activists and vocal journalists both inside Rwanda and living in exile across Africa and in the west.
“We’ve very happy this finally has come to court,” said Leah Karegeya, the victim’s widow, who was seated in the public gallery at the back of the court, a red-brick building in the north-west Johannesburg suburb of Randburg. “The family knows who killed him, but we want the law to do its work and the rest of the world to know.”
One of the co-founders of the RNC, Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa, lives under 24-hour protection in South Africa, after four attempts on his life. After a raid on his safe house in 2010, the South African government expelled three Rwandan diplomats, and relations between the two countries have been strained ever since.
After a meeting in March, both Kagame and the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said they wanted to normalise relations between their two countries. But analysts say evidence presented during what may prove to be a politically embarrassing court process could sabotage that drive.
About a dozen Rwandan opposition supporters, wearing yellow T-shirts printed with Karegeya’s face, sat at the back of the courtroom listening to proceedings.
The inquest is expected to last at least a fortnight. The state prosecutor, Yusuf Baba, said he intended to call at least 30 witnesses to give evidence.
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