WICHITA, kan - a woman whose husband and her three young children were killed during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, wept Thursday as she identified witnesses bar Kansas man it claims to have led an attack on the crowd a mountain where she and many others had sought refuge against the ethnic carnage which was sweep the African nation.
His account was the most emotional but as Lazare Kobagaya trial entered its fifth day of testimony in a federal courtroom in Wichita. The Government is seeking to revoke his citizenship U.S. had lied about his involvement in the genocide, the immigration authorities.
The 84-year-old Topeka man is charged with illegally obtain American citizenship in 2006 with fraud and misuse of a card for alien registration in a case prosecutors said is the first in the United States requiring evidence of genocide. Kobagaya contends he is innocent.
Approximately 500 000 to 800 000 people have been killed in Rwanda between April and July 1994. Most of the dead belonged to an ethnic group known as the Tutsi, while most of the killings were carried out by members of an ethnic group, known as the Hutus.
Valerie Niyitegeka, a Tutsi woman, whose family farmed near the village of Kobagaya, told jurors the events of 15 April 1994, when she, her husband, Appolloni and their six children have fled as the crowds of men burned Hutu houses of Tutsis.
"I was OK to my house to be burned - as long as I am not dead,"she testified by a translator.""
Niyitegeka in detail how she climbed - and sometimes crawled - up to the mountain steep, Rocky of the Mont Nyakizu with his youngest son, attached to his back. It describes how women and children gathered piles of stones for their men to throw as the mobs of Hutus attacked.
She told jurors she was able to identify the old people Kobagaya as the leader of the attacking crowd because she acknowledged how he walked and the cane he was wearing that day. She pointed out to him in the courtroom: "it is there." It is him. ?
The defence tried to cast doubt that identification by noting the trees and other obstacles on the mountain that day.
In the melee as the family flees the mountain in the days that followed, Niyitegeka was separated from her husband and three of her children. She testified that she would never their life once more. The ages of their murdered children were 12, 10 and 8.
Joseph Yandagiye, a farmer of Hutus of 76 years, testified about what happened to children and their father, who have sought refuge in the House of the Yandagiye. After, Yandagiye goes to a few races. When he returned, he said that he found that a crowd of Hutus had already surrounded his house.
Yandagiye said that when the crowd he threatened to try to enter the House, Appollini came out and told the crowd: "Take my place."
Yandagiye also told jurors at the outset, it follows the crowd which had had Appolloni and his children, but shot after they told him they would he kill the itself if it continues to follow.
Later in the day, a group of Hutu men came to him also, Yandagiye testified. It was while he learned that Appolloni and her children were killed.
Yandagiye testified that Kobagaya said the crowd that they should kill him too much because it had housed Tutsi in his house during a dispute in 1959. Yandagiye said another leader of the community, Francois Bazaramba, urged the crowd not to kill him, but to punish the Yandagiye by him to buy beer, which he did.
Bazaramba is a former Rwandan pastor who was sentenced to life in prison by a Finnish Court to commit genocide last year.
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