Rwanda’s Khashoggi: who killed the exiled spy chief?

LONDON, 16 Jan. - (ANA) - Dissident Patrick Karegeya had fled to South Africa, but was murdered in a well-planned attack. Now an inquest into his death threatens to bring unwelcome attention to Rwanda’s feted leader, writes Michela Wrong in the Guardian.

n five-star hotels, the “Do Not Disturb” sign exerts a strange kind of magic. Privacy is the rich man’s prerequisite, and staff are trained never to enter a room when the sign dangles off the door handle, whatever they suspect might be taking place within: a session with a professional escort, a drug deal, an alcoholic binge. None of their business.

The Michelangelo hotel, in Johannesburg’s upmarket Sandton district, looks a tad dated these days, but it is still one of the most popular meeting places for African government ministers, celebrities and local VIPs – the kind of establishment that prides itself on its discretion. So when, on 1 January 2014, a young Rwandan accountant called David Batenga turned up at the Michelangelo and demanded that staff open room 905, the initial reaction was blank refusal. The guest had hung out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, the receptionist told him.

But Batenga insisted. The room had been booked by his uncle, Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence, on behalf of a young businessman friend visiting from Rwanda, Apollo Kiririsi Gafaranga. Batenga was his uncle’s fixer, occasional driver and confidante, so he knew that for a few days, Karegeya had been shuttling from his house in a gated community to the Michelangelo for drinks and meals with Apollo.

In South Africa the Christmas and new year break is a time when schools, shops and government offices close and everyone heads for the beach. Karegeya had moved his family to the US a few years earlier out of concern for their safety, so he was hungry for company. The visit of Apollo, a young man with something of a playboy reputation, had looked just the ticket.

But now Karegeya wasn’t picking up calls or answering messages – unusual behaviour for a man who was rarely off his various smartphones. He hadn’t even called his wife and their three children to wish them a happy new year. It was totally out of character. Batenga had spotted his uncle’s car sitting in the Michelangelo’s parking lot, he told the hotel receptionist – he must be on the premises.

Batenga paced, he nagged, he wheedled, he refused to leave. “I become an asshole. I was literally there the entire day,” he recalled. The hours ticked by and, eventually, sheer mulishness won out. Rolling their eyes, staff at reception finally agreed to call in the police to check the room. When they summoned Batenga over to the desk, their expressions were grim. The whole atmosphere had changed. “Your guest is dead, sir,” one of them announced.

Inside room 905, where the television was playing at full volume, Karegeya lay on his back on the double bed, his hands on either side of his face, streaks of dried blood around his nose and ears. Normally light-skinned, his complexion had turned livid: he’d almost certainly been strangled, then covered in a duvet. A curtain cord and a bloodied towel had been stuffed into the room’s safe. Apollo was gone.

Apollo, Karegeya’s family and friends claim, had been the decoy in a carefully prepared trap. Karegeya had been a key member of the rebel group that took control of Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, and was appointed head of external intelligence by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s leader and his longtime friend. But he fell out with Kagame and fled the country in 2008, setting up an opposition party in exile in South Africa. Apollo befriended Karegeya and the two became drinking buddies in Johannesburg – Karegeya’s grieving family suspect on direct orders from Rwandan intelligence.

Karegeya had every reason to believe that the regime he had done so much to establish was now out to kill him. He and the other three founders of the opposition party in exile, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC), had been tried in absentia by a military court in Rwanda, which found them guilty of threatening state security and sentenced them to 24-year prison terms. One of the charges – which all four denied – was responsibility for a spate of grenade attacks in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in 2010.

Several Rwandans in South Africa had warned Karegeya that they had received calls from military intelligence in Kigali seeking to hire contract killers. During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, one of the other founders of the RNC, General Kayumba Nyamwasa – former chief of staff of the Rwandan army – was shot in the stomach in a failed assassination attempt as he returned from a shopping trip in Johannesburg with his wife. The South African authorities had immediately assigned the two high-profile political exiles 24-hour protection.  - (ANA) -

AB/ANA/ 16 January 2019 - - -