A former Rwandan government official accused of a leading role in carrying out the 1994 genocide in the Central African country has been freed, an international appeals court announced Thursday.
Appellate judges for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sitting in The Hague, Netherlands, ordered the immediate release of Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, who has been held in Arusha, Tanzania, where the court is based.
By a vote of 4 to 1, the judges ruled Wednesday that Barayagwiza had been detained too long without charges and without trial. They ordered him transferred to authorities in Cameroon, where he was jailed after fleeing Rwanda, said a statement issued late Thursday in Arusha.
Barayagwiza's release is a major blow to prosecutors' efforts to hold a joint trial of journalists and media owners involved in the genocide.
Besides serving in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Barayagwiza, 48, was a senior official for a Rwandan hate radio station blamed for helping incite the slaughter of at least 500,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
He had pleaded innocent to six genocide-related counts.
Barayagwiza's freedom may prove brief. Tanzanian authorities could arrest him and hand him over to Rwanda, which is conducting its own genocide trials. There, Barayagwiza would face a speedier trial and the death penalty if convicted.
Life imprisonment is the tribunal's harshest sentence.