Rwandan priest ready to face genocide accusers

A Rwandan priest who has been accused over the 1994 Rwanda genocide is ready to face his accusers.

A statement carried by the Catholic missionary news service Misna said the Rev Athanase Seromba was still in the Florence archdiocese "and he is ready to respond before the law to all of the accusations he is facing".

A 1999 African Rights report accused him of helping orchestrate the massacre of some 2,000 Tutsi refugees at his parish in Nyange, Rwanda, in April 1994.

Seromba left Rwanda for Italy in 1994, the year Hutu extremists massacred more than 500,000 people, most of them Tutsis.

Seromba has said he had already left Nyange when the killings began.

Seromba, a priest in the Florence archdiocese since 1997, left his parish last month to avoid the media after the chief UN war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, said she was "stupefied" that Italy had refused to co-operate with her investigation.

It is said Seromba will not try evading a possible trial "in the hopes that international justice can decide with fairness and equilibrium the facts of the accused".

Members of Italy's Radical Party urged the government on Saturday to extradite Seromba to the UN tribunal for Rwanda, adding its voice to similar calls from African Rights and Amnesty International.