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BERN, Feb 16 (AFP) - Rwandan politician Alfred Muzema has been arrested on suspicion of killing a number of people in his country's inter-ethnic conflict last year, television reports said Thursday.
Muzema owns a tea company in the Rwandan town of Kibuye and has been living in Switzerland for several months.
Up to one million members of Rwanda's Tutsi tribe and moderate Hutus died in massacres last year after the suspicious death in a plane crash of the country's president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, on April 6.
A senior Swiss military official Brigadier General Jurg van Winjnkoop confirmed Muzema's arrest last week.
Muzema, the first Rwandan to be detained in Switzerland after last year's civil war in the central African country, is suspected of having violated international human rights conventions.
Maggy Correa, who heads the Swiss association for international justice in Rwanda, (AJIR), told Swiss television Muzema "had one hundred employees of his company executed."
He ordered members of one family to be buried alive and coordinated massacres in Kibuye and Kigali, the Rwandan capital, she added.
War crimes suspects fall under the jurisdiction of the military courts in Switzerland, case they would have the power to hand Muzema's case over to the UN's international tribunal on Rwanda, legal experts said.
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AFP AFP
