ONE of the most notorious names in the Rwandan genocide - an officer whose troops killed the Rwandan prime minister and the Belgian soldiers protecting her - has been hiding in Zimbabwe, where he is suspected of enjoying business links with former army officers close to the country’s president, Robert Mugabe.

United Nations sources named the fugitive as Major Protais Mpiranya, a Hutu extremist formerly in charge of the Rwandan presidential guard.

Despite a $5m American bounty, Mpiranya has evaded justice for 14 years. But his presence has been detected, “sometimes in Zimbabwe and sometimes in the Congo”, a UN source said. Mpiranya is wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the UN’s war crimes tribunal for Rwanda.

The presence in Zimbabwe of Mpiranya has never been officially admitted by the authorities. He is one of a handful of top leaders of the genocide to have got away. After hunting down, sexually assaulting and murdering Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the prime minister, on April 7, 1994, troops under his command hacked to death the 10 Belgian UN paratroops who had been ordered to protect her.

Their slaughter panicked the Belgian government into withdrawing its troops, in effect rendering the UN force powerless.

The remainder of the UN troops were unable to stop the killings and over the next 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered while the world looked on.

Mpiranya fled to neighbouring Congo. When conflict erupted there in 1998, sucking in six African countries including Zimbabwe, he allied his forces with the 11,000 Zimbabwean troops that Mugabe had sent in.

UN sources said Mpiranya established personal business links with several Zimbabwean officers, some of whom set up their own companies to plunder Congo’s wealth. It is these links that enable him to feel secure in Zimbabwe.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb