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Fabien Neretse, 71, a man who grew up to become an influential member of MRND, the ruling party prior to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, was on Thursday found guilty of genocide by a top Belgian court. He was born in Mataba-Ndusu-Ruhengeri, in October 1948.
Neretse was the firstborn in his family and was 16 when his father, Alain Nsabimana, died in 1965, at the age of 69.
His mother, Astérie Nyiramasaka, Nsabimana’s second wife, died in 2009, aged 85. It is reported that Nsabimana’s first wife, Dorothée Nyiranturo, who passed on in 1946 had seven children.
The genocidaire’s name Neretse, The New Times has learnt, is actually a shortened version of Neretsabagabo, the name he was given as a child.
In 1976, he married Bibiane Nimukuze with whom they have five children, two boys and three girls. He reportedly has nine grandchildren.
Today, most of his children, grandchildren, and wife, live in Angoulême, the capital of the Charente department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of southwestern France.
When he arrived in France, three years after the Genocide, in 1997, he adopted another name – as most genocide fugitives do to elude capture – Nsabimana.
Neretse claims to have left Rwanda in July 1994 and headed to former Zaire, now DR Congo, before going to the Central African Republic (CAR) and later joining his wife and children in France. His family arrived in France, earlier, in 1996.
Sources say he acquired refugee status in France, in 1999.
Earlier, he studied agricultural sciences in Stuttgart, Germany until 1975.
From 1975, he was at ISAR, a national agricultural research institute, from 1978 to 1980, he was co-director of BGM (Bugesera-Gisaka-Micongo), an agro-pastrol project. From 1980 to 1989, he was the director of OCIR Café, the then Rwanda coffee authority, and from February 1992, he worked at the then ministry of industry and artisanat.
From September 1992, he created his own office, the SMP or Services Matieres Premieres.
During the 1994 Genocide he was once the head officer of ACEDI Mataba, a secondary school based in Gakenke District, which he built earlier in 1989. He eventually became the leader of the Interahamwe militia in the area.
He used his clout to organize killings of the Tutsi in Kigali, especially the murder of a Belgian citizen, Claire Beckers, as well as her Tutsi husband, Isaie Bucyana, and their daughter Katia in April 1994, in Kigali.
jkaruhanga@newtimesrwanda.com
