The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) announced that the last remaining fugitives wanted over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have been confirmed dead.
The UN agency said that the UN-sanction mechanism has accounted for all fugitives indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for crimes committed during the genocide.
The office has concluded that the last two fugitives - Ryandikayo, a businessman known only by one name, and Charles Sikubwabo, a former mayor and businessman, both died in 1998, about four years after they fled Rwanda for what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The charges included genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, murder as a crime against humanity, extermination as a crime against humanity, and other crimes committed in Kibuye on the shores of Lake Kivu.
Since 2020, the Office of the Prosecutor's fugitive tracking team has located all eight ICTR fugitives. The Office apprehended two fugitives, Félicien Kabuga in Paris, France, in May 2020 and Fulgence Kayishema in Paarl, South Africa, in May 2023. The agency also confirmed the deaths of six other fugitives.
The office said it faced serious challenges in apprehending criminals, ranging from the political unwillingness of countries to carry out arrests to sophisticated efforts by fugitives to conceal their identities and locations.
The prosecutor added that while the search for the last ICTR fugitives is over, it is critical to remind the world that there are still more than 1,000 fugitives who are sought by national authorities.
"While we should be satisfied that there are no more ICTR fugitives, this work cannot stop until all perpetrators of crimes during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda have been brought to justice," he said.
In 1994, the Hutu ethnic group launched a genocide against the smaller Tutsi community and moderate Hutu who refused to participate in the killings. Between April and June 1994, some 800,000 people - overwhelmingly Tutsis, but also Twa and others - were killed.