A JOURNALIST working for a newspaper closed down by the Rwandan government has been shot dead in Kigali.
Police said that Jean Leonard Ruganbage (35,) the acting editor of Umuvugizi newspaper, was shot twice outside his home in a suburb of Kigali on Thursday night.
Police say they do not know who was behind the attack, but the paper’s exiled editor, Jean Bosco Gasasira, blamed the government.
“There is no doubt that the security services shot him dead,” Gasasira told The Irish Times on the phone from Uganda, where he has lived since he was forced to flee Rwanda in April after his paper was suspended and forced to publish solely online.
“President Kagame is using the security services to suppress opposition, and that’s meant that journalists have been either murdered or forced to flee.”
On August 9th Rwanda holds its second election since the country’s 1994 genocide, when President Paul Kagame will seek a second term in office. International rights groups have expressed growing concerns over a government clampdown on freedom of the press and opposition parties ahead of the vote.
“The suspensions of newspapers, repeated cases against media professionals and the blocking of internet sites don’t appear to have been enough to make the international community react,” Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders said.
“Will this tragic incident at least open the eyes of those who endorse the Kigali regime?”
Gasasira linked his colleague’s killing with a story published by the paper online this week, in which Rwandan intelligence was blamed for an alleged assassination attempt on former army chief Lt Gen Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa last weekend.
The e-paper said it had found evidence that a captain in Rwanda’s Republican Guard shot the pistol in the attack.
Lt Gen Nyamwasa went into exile in South Africa earlier this year after falling out with Mr Kagame, whom he accused of corruption. Rwanda is seeking his extradition in connection with a string of deadly grenade attacks in Kigali this year.
Lt Gen Nyamwasa, who rejects the charges, has been indicted alongside Mr Kagame for war crimes by French and Spanish judges.