Athanase Seromba

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Athanase Seromba (born 1963) is a Rwandan priest who was found guilty of involvement in the Rwandan genocide.

At the time of the genocide, Seromba was priest of a Catholic parish in the Kibuye province of western Rwanda. He is charged for the deaths of around 2,000 Tutsis who took refuge in his parish church. According to the charges brought against him, Seromba ordered his church to be bulldozed, and then shot the survivors between April 6 and 20, 1994.

Seromba fled Rwanda in 1994 to Europe and, lived in Italy using the alias Anastasio Sumba Bura. Under pressure from Carla Del Ponte, currently a Chief UN War Crimes Prosecutor, Seromba surrendered himself to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on February 6, 2002. On February 8, 2002 he pleaded not guilty to the charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. His trial began on September 20, 2004 before the Third Trial Chamber of the ICTR. On 13 December 2006, he was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.^[1]