FOUR Rwandans accused of genocide and living in Britain face arrest and extradition as part of a determined crackdown on war criminals by the British authorities.

Rwanda applied two months ago for the extradition of the four, who are accused of a central role in the mass slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutus in 1994. Two of the men were tracked down by The Sunday Times.

A visit to Rwanda by British officials, including members of the Crown Prosecution Service and two police officers who were in Kigali last week, indicates that the government is treating the extradition request as a matter of urgency. It wants to demonstrate that Britain refuses to be used as a haven for war crimes suspects, Whitehall sources said.

The wanted men are Emmanuel Nteziryayo, Charles Munyaneza, Celestin Ugirashebuja and Vincent Bajinya. They cannot be tried in Britain as courts here do not have jurisdiction over acts of genocide committed by foreign nationals outside the country.

All four men claim to be innocent and it is clear that they will fight any attempt to send them home on the grounds that Britain has no extradition treaty with Rwanda, that they would be denied a fair trial there and that the country still has the death penalty.

Last week Emmanuel Rukangira, the Rwandan state prosecutor, said that Britain may yet discover that it is harbouring other Rwandan war crimes suspects.

“It is entirely possible that there are other mass killers in Britain we do not know about,” he said. Earlier this year Rukangira drew up a list of 93 leading alleged participants in the genocide who had escaped abroad and called on the countries in which they were sheltering to prosecute them or to return them to Rwanda for trial.

One of the wanted men, Nteziryayo, 52, is living on welfare in Manchester under a false name. A former mayor, he is accused of inciting, arming and organising his militiamen in the slaughter of at least 84,000 Tutsis.

While the Home Office granted him asylum, the Department for International Development donated nearly £150,000 to help set up a memorial and genocide centre on the site where Nteziryayo’s militia men allegedly carried out the massacres.

Munyaneza, 47, also a former mayor and a friend of Nteziryayo, lives in Bedford, where he works as a cleaner. He is alleged to have urged people to massacre Tutsis, saying at one point: “All of you, men, women and girls, must take part. I don’t want to see a single Tutsi alive on this hill.”

Ugirashebuja, 55, the third wanted man is another former mayor. “We have killed a lot, but it is not over yet. What remains to be done is to proceed house by house, bush by bush, to find the remaining Tutsis,” he was allegedly heard to say.

After the genocide Ugirashebuja was said to have fled to the Congo on a helicopter organised by a Rwandan bishop in the Anglican church who was himself later arrested for genocide.

The bishop died recently in prison but Ugirashebuja remained free. From the Congo, he made his way to Kenya where he spent a year studying for the priesthood in a theological college before settling in Britain.

How he got into Britain remains a mystery. Rwandan officials believe he may have had the assistance of members of the Anglican church. His neighbours at Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex, know him as a God-fearing member of the community and were dismayed to learn that he is a suspected war criminal.

Bajinya, the fourth wanted man, is a doctor. Eyewitnesses have accused him of directing Hutu militia at roadblocks where many Tutsis were killed.

In Britain, Bajinya served on a refugee taskforce for the government and once attended a seminar with John Hutton, then a health minister. He was employed by Praxis, a London-based charity, to deal with refugee nurses and midwives seeking employment. Praxis has now suspended him. Vaughan Jones, its director, said the charity was a small organisation that had not had the resources to check Bajinya’s credentials.

Survivors of the massacres in which the four men were allegedly involved are watching closely to see how Britain handles the cases. Drocelle Kantetere, 36, lost her parents and six siblings in the slaughter. “Munyaneza has everything now, but I have no one left in my family,” she said. “I accuse Munyaneza of forcing me to be so alone, to try and get by in a world that I find empty of meaning.”

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