Bernard Ntuyahaga Major Bernard Ntuyahaga , Rwandan Armed Forces , ( probably born in 1952 ) was convicted by a Belgian court in the murders of ten United Nations peacekeepers at the start of the Rwandan Genocide . Biography . Ntuyahaga was born in Mabanza , Kibuye Prefecture , Rwanda . In 1972 , he went to the army officer ' s school in Kigali . In 1994 , he held the rank of major . On 7 April 1994 , the day after the assassinations of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi , the house of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana , which was under the protection of fifteen peacekeepers under the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda , was surrounded by soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces . After the five Ghanaian and ten Belgian peacekeepers were disarmed , the Ghanaians were released and Madame Agathe and her husband were murdered . The murders were carried out in front of Ntuyahaga and other soldiers . The Belgian court found that Ntuyahaga had transported the ten Belgians to a military camp , where they were subsequently killed by fellow soldiers . He was further found to have murdered an undetermined number of Rwandan civilians during the genocide and sentenced to twenty years in prison . Legal history . In June 1998 , Ntuyahaga surrendered himself to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ( ICTR ) in Arusha , Tanzania . In September of that year , the ICTR issued an indictment charging him with : conspiracy to commit genocide ; genocide or complicity in genocide ; war crime s ; and two counts of crimes against humanity . Ntuyahaga pleaded not guilty . However , on 18 March 1999 the ICTR dropped its charges . In the face of public outcry and official outrage from the Rwandan Patriotic Front government of Rwanda , deputy prosecutor Bernard Muna explained that the ICTR counts only carried a moderate prison sentence and that they hoped Tanzania would extradite Ntuyahaga to Belgium , which could hold a trial over the murders of the peacekeepers . However , Rwanda stated that Ntuyahaga should be extradited to Rwanda , which would try him over the murder of the prime minister . On the same day as the ICTR dropped its charges , Tanzanian authorities arrested Ntuyahaga for entering the country illegally . The following years saw a complicated set of legal procedures , including an application by Ntuyahaga for asylum as a refugee in Tanzania and Tanzania adjusting its charges against Ntuyahaga to fall under its extradition treaty with Rwanda . This eventually ended when Tanzania denied Rwanda ' s request for extradition in favor of Belgium . In March 2004 , Ntuyahaga , of his own free will , flew to Belgium , accompanied by a Belgian diplomat . There , he gave himself up and was put in prison on remand . He was charged with handing over the Belgian soldiers to the Rwandan soldiers in the Kigali military camp of which he was an officer , without taking any measures to prevent their massacre ; of celebrating with the soldiers implicated in the massacres of the Kigali Tutsi civilian population , and of allowing these soldiers to use his residence as the headquarters . On 7 September 2006 , the trial chamber referred the case to the Assize Court . The trial began on 19 April 2007 . On 4 July 2007 , the court came back with the verdict of guilty in the murder of the peacekeepers and an unknown number of Rwandan civilians . He was found not guilty in the murder of the prime minister and the killing of an unknown number of civilians in Butare . The public prosecutor asked for life imprisonment , but the following day the jury sentenced Ntuyahaga to twenty years imprisonment . Defense lawyer Luc de Temmerman stated that they would most likely not appeal . The reason for this is that convicts may ask for conditional release after serving a third of their sentence . Judges may take part of the time served in jail in Tanzania and Rwanda into account , meaning that Ntuyahaga may spend only a few years in jail .