When a British friend met up with Patrick Karegeya in a Johannesburg hotel in late 2013, the former Rwandan head of external intelligence appeared to have reached a crisis point. There was no sign of the two bodyguards — supplied by the South African government — who once dogged his every move. “He referred to himself as ‘a dead man walking’ but strolled from garage to foyer without a sideways glance, taking no notice of possible surveillance,” remembers the friend. “He was the most depressed I’ve seen him in years.”
Karegeya, who fled into exile in 2007 after falling out with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and being charged with insubordination, had tired of his shadows. When he and I met for lunch in late 2012 — a lunch that went on for hours because, I suspect, he had nothing else to do — Karegeya complained that the presence of the two bodyguards, perched at a table next to us, made normal life impossible. His wife and children moved to the United States after that meeting, finding the situation unbearable. Friends later reported he was running short of money and thinking of taking a job, though he knew a predictable daily routine would make it easier for Rwandan agents he believed were on his trail.
“Patrick being Patrick, he decided to be on his own,” says political ally and fellow dissident Theogene Rudasingwa. “He has paid a very big price for that.”
On Dec. 29, 2013, Karegeya booked into a suite in the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton, a favorite hangout for South Africa’s elite, where he was due to meet a Rwandan businessman he knew and trusted. When a few days later the hotel staff, alerted by a worried nephew, opened the door to the suite, on which a “Do Not Disturb” sign hung, they found his bruised body on the bed. Karegeya had possibly been drugged before being strangled with a curtain rope. Karegeya’s years of running were over.
Lurid and intimate, the murder triggered an international outcry and allegations that the Rwandan government was behind the killings. Despite his sinister past (Karegeya was head of intelligence when Rwandan forces hunted down Hutu refugees in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1990s, killing tens of thousands), the clever, gregarious spy chief at Kagame’s elbow had cultivated relationships with diplomats, journalists, and foreign officials, and they were shocked by his death. Moreover, Rwanda was in the headlines because of the approaching 20th anniversary of the country’s genocide — which began on April 7, 1994 — so it was a sensitive time.
Yet there was more to come.
On March 3, armed men broke into the Johannesburg home of Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, searching in vain for the former Rwandan army chief of staff, an ally of Karegeya who was also living in exile and who had already survived two botched assassination attempts in 2010. The raid on a “safe house” provided by the South African government and guarded by a police detail was the last straw: Pretoria promptly expelled four Rwandan diplomats and a Burundian envoy, citing in a statement “sustained and organized efforts to kill some of the refugees living in the Republic.” [FULL STORY]
