Maputo – A Rwandan dissident has been shot dead in Mozambique, where he had settled as a refugee after being ousted from his home country in 1994, police said on Tuesday.
Unidentified gunmen intercepted Revocant Karemangingo, a former Rwandan lieutenant, as he drove into his house on Monday evening in Matola, a suburb of the capital Maputo.
“The bandits… fired nine shots at the vehicle. The victim was immediately taken to hospital but he died,” police spokesperson Carmina Leite said.
“There are still no leads to the killers,” she said, adding that police were “working on the case”.
Karemangingo, 49, is the latest in a series of Rwandan dissidents murdered in southern Africa in recent years.
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Alongside refugees and economic migrants, the region has attracted critics of President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, which took power after the genocide in 1994.
Karemangingo was thought to have kept a foot in opposition politics from his new home.
“The Rwandan community in Mozambique is scared with this murder,” Cleophas Habiyaremye, president of the Association of Rwandan Refugees in Mozambique said.
“The Kigali government is persecuting Rwandan refugees not only in Mozambique but around the world,” he said.
A number of killings have been reported over the past decade, including two Rwandan opposition activists who were murdered in South Africa in 2014 and 2021.
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The latter was shot dead as he delivered furniture in a Cape Town township.
The former, ex-intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya, was found strangled in a hotel room.
In October 2012, the body of the former head of Rwanda’s Development Bank, Theogene Turatsinze, was found floating at sea off Maputo.
Two years later, Pretoria expelled Rwandan diplomats after a South African court found four men guilty of trying to assassinate Rwanda’s ex-army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in 2010.
Rwanda is regularly accused of chasing after opponents in exile, a charge Kigali has always denied.
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Picture: Getty Images
Source: AFP
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