Lieutenant Colonel Jean Marie Vianney Nzapfakumunsi, 69 years old, who is alleged to have collaborated with Fulgence Kayishema to plan the massacre of approximately 2000 Tutsi refugees – women, men, children and elderly – at the Nyange Catholic Church during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, has been spotted in France.
As reported by the newspaper ‘La Liberation’, a former officer of the Rwandan gendarmerie, the Lt. Col, who has changed his identity (name) from Nzapfakumunsi to Munsy is now living peacefully in Essonne, Northern France for beyond to two decades.
The story goes on to say that he has also been naturalized French citizen.
It is said that Nzapfakumunsi gave Father Seromba, who was the head priest of the Nyange Parish the help of the equipment used in the massacre of April 15 and 16, 1994 as reported by various witnesses.
“A witnesses remember a second genocidaire, the man who brought and distributed the guns with which the young Hutu militiamen were going to execute the survivors, most of them wounded in the rubble. He then funneled liquor from the convent to reward killers, then oversaw the leveling of mass graves before handing out beers. According to the testimonies we have collected, it would be Jean-Marie Vianney Nzapfakumunsi, a lieutenant-colonel of the local gendarmerie,” the article said.
He is also alleged of being the one who destroyed the Church building on April 15, 1994 until the roof collapsed on the Tutsi who had fled there.
After the roof collapsed, the killers attacked the survivors with traditional weapons including spears, machettes and guns. Those with guns included community police, gendarmes and Interahamwe militias.
A witness named Papias, who was an employee of Nyange Parish at that time, said that about 2000 Tutsi were killed.
Colonel Nzapfakumunsi, who was born in the former Kivumu commune, studied at the school of police officers in France from 1979 to 1980.
In February 1991, he was appointed head of the National Gendarmerie replacing Colonel Charles Uwihoreye.
After the Genocide against the Tutsi, he spent one year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two more in Cameroon.
After arriving in France in 1997, he studied criminology in Paris 2000-2004, and was employed as a consultant at the French unemployment agency (Pôle emploi).
France granted him asylum in 2001 and in 2004 granted him citizenship, changing his name to Munsy.
29 years after the Genocide against the Tutsi happened, justice continues to search for those who participated and found some of them in African and European countries.
On May 24, Fulgence Kayishema, a former judicial police officer in Kivumu Municipality who was involved in the planning and execution of the Genocide in Nyange, was arrested in South Africa.
It is expected that the Office of International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, IRMCT will decide to send him to Rwanda so that he can impeached for the alleged crimes.
Like Jean-Marie Vianney Nzapfakumunsi, more than 40 people suspected of having participated in the extermination of Tutsi in 1994 are living peaceful days for closer to three decades in France.
