ARUSHA, Tanzania - The much-postponed genocide trial of Athanase Seromba, the first Catholic priest to be tried by the UN-mandated international court for Rwanda, will resume next month, officials said Tuesday.
Seromba's trial, which had been indefinitely postponed at the request of the defense in early March, is to start up again before the Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on May 10, they said.
ICTR judge Andresia Vaz on Tuesday gave the defense until that date to finish carrying out witness surveys in Rwanda and begin to present its case, according to the independent Hirondelle News Agency covering the court.
Seromba is being defended Cameroonian attorney Patrice Monthe and Beninois lawyer Alfred Pognon, the latter of whom won the acquittal in a local Rwandan court Augustin Misago, another Catholic priest accused of involvement in the genocide.
In the case of Father Seromba, Pognon is expected to call the 38 defense witnesses following the appearance on behalf of the prosecution of 15 witnesses the last of which testified on January 25.
Seromba, 42, is accused of genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. The most serious charge relates to an April 1994 incident in which Hutu militants massacred some 2,000 Tutsis in his parish church.
The bespectacled priest has denied all the charges although many prosecution witnesses testified that Seromba ordered the church to be bulldozed with the Tutsis inside.
Pognon has said he will argue that while Seromba was present at the time of the killings, he was powerless to intervene.
Although Seromba is the first Catholic priest to be tried by the ICTR, two others are awaiting trial before the court which has tried and convicted one other religious leader: Elisaphan Ntakirutimana, the ex-president of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in western Rwanda.
The octogenarian Ntakirutimana was convicted in February 2003 of aiding and abetting the extermination of Tutsis and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The highest-ranking religious leader ever to be brought before the UN court was Samuel Musabyimana, an Anglican bishop, who died in detention in 2003 before his trial began.
At least 800,000 people, most of them minority Tutsis, were killed between April and July 1994 in Rwanda after the assassination of a Hutu president led to the organized slaughter of Tutsis and Hutu opponents.
The ICTR, set up in 1994 to prosecute those responsible, has to date convicted 21 people for their part in the genocide and acquitted three.
04/05/2005 14:25 GMT