Kagame’s Death List Just Increased – Another Rwandan Murdered Overseas

By David Himbara

For 25 years, from 1996 to 2021, perceived enemies of General Paul Kagame were murdered overseas. Kagame celebrates the deaths. In a reference to a failed assassination, he said that his government never misses a target. On another occasion, Kagame said that it is a matter of time for his enemies overseas to be assassinated. Kagame just increased his death list – Karemangingo was murdered in Mozambique on September 13, 2021.

General Paul Kagame’s soldiers are fighting Islamist rebels who had taken control of Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province. Understandably, the thousands of Rwandan refugees in Mozambique were alarmed when Kagame soldiers landed – the refugees understood that Kagame’s killing machine would use the military cover to murder people. As in other South African countries, there is a sizeable community of Rwandan refugees who fled to Mozambique in 1994.

Sure enough, a Rwandan is now dead in Mozambique. A refugee leader, Revocat Karemangingo, was shot dead near his home in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, on September 13, 2021. Karemangingo had warned the Mozambican security forces that some people who wanted to kill him had something to do with Rwanda.

Kagame’s death list of Rwandans murdered overseas which began in October 1996 with the assassination in Nairobi, Kenya, of Théoneste Lizinde, a former intelligence official, just increased. Karemangingo’s death is also not the first in Mozambique – Theogene Turatsinze went missing on 11 or 12 October 2012, in Maputo. His body was found on the 15th, tied up and floating in the sea. Police in Mozambique initially indicated Rwandan government involvement in the killing, but soon retracted the accusation. Turatsinze was thought to have had access to politically sensitive financial information related to the looting of the Development Bank of Rwanda.

Other victims on Kagame’s death list include Seth Sendashonga murdered in Kenya in 1998; Charles Ingabire, a reporter murdered in Uganda in 2011; Kayumba Nyamwasa, the former army chief of staff who survived three assassination attempts in 2010–2013; and former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya murdered in 2014. Seif Bamporiki, a businessman, was assassinated in Cape Town, South Africa in February 2021.