Agathe Uwilingiyimana - Assassination

Assassination

The talks between President Habyarimana, Uwilingiyimana, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front were never concluded, because the president's plane was shot down by rockets at around 8:30 pm on 6 April 1994. From Habyarimana's death until her assassination the following morning (approximately 14 hours), Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana was Rwanda's constitutional head of government.

In an interview with Radio France on the night of President Habyarimana's assassination, Uwilingiyimana said that there would be an immediate investigation. She also said, in her last recorded words:

There is shooting, people are being terrorized, people are inside their homes lying on the floor. We are suffering the consequences of the death of the head of state, I believe. We, the civilians, are in no way responsible for the death of our head of state.

The U.N. peacekeeping force sent a Belgian escort to her home before 3 am the following morning; they intended to take her to Radio Rwanda, from where she planned a dawn broadcast appealing for national calm. Uwilingiyimana's house was further guarded by five Ghanaian U.N. troops on the outside in addition to the ten Belgian troops. Inside the house, the family was protected by the Rwandan presidential guard, but between 6:55 and 7:15 am the presidential guard surrounded the U.N. troops and told them to lay down their arms. Fatally, the blue berets ultimately complied, handing over their weapons just before 9 am.

Seeing the stand-off outside her home, Agathe Uwilingiyimana and her family took refuge in the Kigali U.N. volunteer compound around 8 am. Eye-witnesses to the inquiry on U.N. actions say that Rwandan soldiers entered the compound at 10 am, and searched it for Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Fearing for the lives of her children, Agathe and her husband emerged, and they were shot and killed by the presidential guard on the morning of 7 April 1994. Her children escaped and eventually took refuge in Switzerland. In his book, Me Against My Brother, Scott Peterson writes that the U.N. troops sent to protect Uwilingiyimana were castrated, gagged with their own genitalia, and then murdered.

In his book Shake Hands with the Devil, U.N. commander Roméo Dallaire writes that Uwilingiyimana and her husband surrendered themselves to the genocidaires to save their children, who stayed successfully hidden in the adjoining housing compound for employees of the United Nations Development Programme. The children survived and were picked by Captain Mbaye Diagne, a UNAMIR military observer, who smuggled them into the Hôtel des Mille Collines. They were eventually resettled in Switzerland.

Major Bernard Ntuyahaga was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for the murder of Uwilingiyimana and the U.N. peacekeepers, but the charges were dropped. He was eventually convicted of murder of the peacekeepers. On December 18, 2008, the ICTR found Colonel Théoneste Bagosora guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced him to life imprisonment, in part due to his involvement in the murders of Uwilingiyimana and the Belgian peacekeepers.