Rwanda's former minister for higher education was jailed for life today for his role in the genocide of some 800,000 people.
Jean de Dieu Kamuhanda (51), handed out guns, grenades and machetes and personally led attacks on civilians by soldiers and militia, witnesses told a UN tribunal in Tanzania.
He was found guilty of genocide and was sentenced to life in prison.
The court in Arusha is trying the perpetrators of the tiny central African country's 1994 genocide, in which extremists from the ethnic Hutu majority butchered minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 100 days of bloodshed.
In addition to publicly inciting the extermination of Tutsis, the tribunal heard how, in the first days of the genocide, Kamuhanda led a militia attack on a parish church where refugees were sheltering.
Judge William Hussein Sekule said: "He instigated and led an attack to kill people who had taken shelter in a place universally recognised to be a sanctuary, the compound of Gikomero parish church. As a result of this attack many people were massacred."
Women who were carried away by the militiamen were raped and killed, his indictment read.
Kamuhanda was arrested in France in November 1999 and transferred to the ICTR where his trial began in September 2001.
The UN tribunal is keen to show progress in trying senior former officials to counter Rwandan Government accusations of inefficiency. The UN court, set up in November 1994, has now sentenced 17 people, four of whom are appealing against their convictions.