Witness links defendant in Montreal genocide trial to mass rape

Family members of Desir Munyaneza, who is accused of widespread murder and rape during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, snickered in court on Tuesday when a witness described him as a killer.

The woman, who was 17 at the time of the genocide, managed to describe a long scar stretching from Munyaneza's left ear to his chin.

The only other way she described him was "a killer."

"I recognize him," said the woman, who was sitting directly across from the prisoner's box. "I saw him as soon as I entered this court and I felt very frightened."

More than 500,000 members of Rwanda's Tutsi ethnic group were systematically slaughtered by Hutus during the 1994 genocide.

Munyaneza, 40, is the first person to be charged and tried under Canada's crimes against humanity and war crimes law.

He was arrested in 2005 at his Etobicoke, Ont., home after a six-year RCMP investigation. He came to Canada as a refugee in 1997.

While cross-examining the woman, known only as C15 to protect her identity, defence lawyer Richard Perras suggested the only reason the woman could identify Munyaneza was that he was the only black man in the courtroom who was sitting behind glass windows and beside a guard.

Why, Perras asked, could the witness not identify the accused when she was questioned by RCMP officers in 2003?

Munyaneza "would come out at night. It was during a war and I couldn't see the person to describe him," she said through an interpreter.

"A long time has lapsed. That is why I told investigators that I could be more specific if I could see him or if I could testify at his trial."

She told the Quebec Superior Court hearing how she tried to kill herself by drinking tea made with stagnant water rather than be hacked to death by a machete.

And when the refugees, weak from hunger and thirst, tried to drink from a river, they scooped up heads of the dead along with the bloodied water.

The woman, one of 13 witnesses brought from Rwanda to testify, took the stand March 26, the first day of the trial.

But she fainted from the trauma of recounting the horrific details of the genocide and had to be hospitalized.

Her voice was forceful on Tuesday and the interpreter told the judge the woman "was strong."

The witness said she saw Munyaneza at a motel owned by someone named Maheng.

It was a place where women were taken and raped repeatedly by the Interahamwe, the extremist Hutu militia.

In her earlier testimony, she said she was raped by 10 men on one day. "There were about five young men there in one room," she said. "Desire had a gun."

The trial continues on Wednesday.