A Rwandan official has said that 119 genocide victims’ bodies were found in the south as authorities continue to locate mass grave sites nearly three decades after the massacres.
Reports show the body parts of around 180 people have been taken out of burial spaces at a plantation of bananas in Ngoma village, according to excavation committee member Goretti Uwonkunda.
Genocide perpetrators attempted to conceal potentially damaging evidence, which led to the discovery of more victims’ bones, Naphtal Ahishakiye, executive secretary of Ibuka, said to foreign press agencies. Ahishakiye noted that genocide perpetrators fear the law would catch them.
Rwanda will mark the 30th anniversary of the Hutu extremist genocide of eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu in April.
Genocide survivor Louise Uwimana of Huye district was dismayed to learn that her fellow residents had withheld mass grave information at an era in which the government was fostering reconciliation. She doubted the possibility of reconciliation when genocide offenders hid the truth, she remarked to a media outlet.
More than 100,000 individuals have been removed from the ground in Rwanda in the past five years, as reported by IBUKA. Mass graves located on a Catholic plantation in Rusizi were found last year, with the bodies of over a thousand people said to have been killed in the genocide. According to IBUKA chairman Ahishakiye, six remains were discovered under a house in Huye township last October by officials in the landlocked county.
Ahishakiye told the media that three decades after the genocide, survivors are searching for their loved ones, leading them to assume that comparable mass graves are still uncovered across the country.
As the digging proceeds to ensure the remains are appropriately buried, Huye area mayor Ange Sebutege has invited villagers to provide details of where the bodies can be found.
