A Dutch court has sentenced a man to life in prison for helping incite and take part in the 1994 massacre of about 3,000 Tutsis during Rwanda’s genocide.
“Only a long life imprisonment would be appropriate. So that’s the punishment we will impose,” the presiding judge said as he delivered the verdict.
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“We’re talking about war crimes and genocide in this case,” the judge added.
Prosecutors said the Rwandan-born Dutch national, identified only as Eugene N., went on a “rampage of looting and destruction” in the period before the killings, setting homes on fire and stealing residents’ belongings.
They argued that N. was “personally involved” in the violence and urged the court to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.
“If the horrific crimes of the suspect, in which not one but an estimated 3,000 innocent people were literally slaughtered, in which the suspect personally threw a grenade into a stadium … do not deserve a life sentence, then what does?” one prosecutor told the court during hearings in June.
The Rwandan genocide left an estimated 800,000 people dead over roughly three months in 1994.
United Nations figures indicate that most of those killed belonged to Rwanda’s Tutsi minority.
N. rejected the accusations, maintaining that he was himself a victim who lost dozens of relatives in what he called “those horrific events”.
His lawyers sought acquittal on every charge, arguing that their client had instead done “everything to prevent the genocide”.
“The case has torn his scars open again. He is a broken man,” one of the defence lawyers said during the trial.
N. escaped to the Netherlands in 1998.
Rwandan authorities sought his arrest internationally in 2014.
But Dutch law prevents his extradition because he later acquired Dutch nationality.
Dutch prosecutors launched their own investigation in 2020, interviewing dozens of witnesses in Rwanda before arresting him in 2024.
Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which permits courts to prosecute the gravest crimes regardless of where they occurred, European courts have tried and convicted several dozen people linked to the Rwanda genocide.
