Finally Kigali has succedded in eliminating Patrick Karegeya. No doubt, by assasinating Karegeya implies that the struggle for dislodging Kagame is extended to more than a decade behind.
For Kagame, among all opposed to his governance, its only Karegeya who gave him real sleepless nights. Kagame must have celebrated the new year as the happiest man on planet earth. Though Junior to Gen Kayumba the former army chief, Karegeya was the No. 1 on Kagame’s list of wanted dissidents. The earlier assasination attempt on Kayumba Nyamwasa must have been a desperate move out of frustrations after failing to get Karegeya. The monetary cost of his assassination must have been the equivallency of the budget of three ministries in the Rwanda government.
If the Rwanda exiles were planning to use force to dislolge Kagame, it was Karegeya who was the brain behind such plans. In 2011, a Rwandan military court sentenced Karegeya, Nyamwasa and two other exiled officers to 20 years in prison for threatening state security after they were tried in absentia.In 2010, Nyamwasa was shot in the stomach as he drove into the driveway of his upmarket Johannesburg home.
He survived what his family said was an assassination attempt ordered by Kagame.In 2012, Karegeya, pictured above, said he expected to be killed because he knew the regime’s ‘dark secrets’.South African intelligence sources claimed his drink had been spiked with poison to make his death look like suicide.But they added that the killer seemed to have bungled the job and had to strangle him.
On 1 January 2014, Karegeya was found dead at the Michelangelo Towers, an upmarket hotel in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton in South Africa. Reports indicate he had gone to attend a meeting at the hotel when he was murdered. The circumstances leading to his death remain unknown. The South African police are conducting investigations although the Rwandan opposition party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC) said in a statement to AFP that “He was strangled by agents of (Rwandan President Paul) Kagame,” having previously survived several assassination attempts. Karegeya leaves behind his wife Leah and three children.
Karegeya was born in Mbarara in southwestern Uganda. He attended Makerere University where he earned a Bachelor of Law degree. He joined the National Resistance Army in Uganda but was arrested in June 1982 and charged with treason, spending three years in jail. Later he joined President Yoweri Museveni in the struggle that led to the overthrow of Milton Obote. He was a lieutenant in Ugandan military intelligence when the decision to invade Rwanda was made, at a time when his friend Paul Kagame was studying in the USA.
From 1994 to 2004 Karegeya was Director General, External Intelligence in the Rwandan Defence Forces. As chief of intelligence in Rwanda he had great power. Karegeya was arrested and served an 18-month sentence for desertion and insubordination. He was stripped of his rank of Colonel on 13 July 2006 by a military tribunal and fled the country in 2007. Later, Kagame claimed that he was in the pay of South African military intelligence. FULL STORY
