A Rwandan community court charged a Belgian missionary with inciting and planning the 1994 genocide in which more than half a million people were killed.
The community court classified Guy Theunis as a category one genocide suspect -- reserved for alleged leaders of the 100-day slaughter. The case was automatically transferred for trial to a conventional court, where the missionary will face a possible death penalty.
Theunis, of the Missionaries of Africa, insisted that information that was supplied to back the charges was false. He was brought in front of one of the community courts, known as Gacaca, for questioning Sunday before a panel of nine judges decided to file the formal charges against him.
Theunis -- who worked as the editor of Rwanda's periodical Le Dialogue -- denied allegations that he incited the genocide by reproducing articles from the Kangura, a newspaper that promoted the killing of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority.
A UN tribunal has convicted the editor of that newspaper, Hassan Ngeze, and sentenced him to life in prison.
"I am astonished to hear all these allegations leveled against me. I sometimes wrote articles to press for human rights. I never republished articles from Kangura, but just translated as part of a press review," Theunis told the court Sunday, speaking in Rwanda's national language, Kinyarwanda.
Theunis, 60, worked in Rwanda from 1970 until 1994, when Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority were slaughtered in a 100-day genocide orchestrated by the extremist Hutu government then in power.
Theunis, who has been living in South Africa since 1994, was arrested Sept. 6 while traveling through Rwanda's capital, Kigali, from neighboring Congo.
An international human rights activist was the only person to defend the missionary during Sunday's proceedings.
Alison de Forges of the US-based Human Rights Watch said she knows Theunis as a human rights advocate, adding that some accusations leveled by witnesses went beyond the legal period covered by Gacaca courts.
Some genocide survivors were harsh in their accusations against Theunis, who was clad in the pink shirt and shorts that are worn by prisoners in Rwanda.
"Instead of preaching the Gospel, the missionary was preaching divisions" between Tutsis and Hutus, Jean Damascene Bizimana told the court.
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