A British woman has described her terror at being seized at night from a Rwandan bus station and held incommunicado by President Kagame’s government for two weeks after she returned for her father’s funeral.
Violette Uwamahoro, 39, a pregnant youth worker from Leeds who arrived back in Britain yesterday, was kept in a small room with a bare mattress, handcuffed and with her ankles bound, and interrogated relentlessly after her detention on Valentine’s Day.
Rwandan police claimed that she and a distant cousin, who is a police officer, had used the WhatsApp messaging service to spread state secrets and had attempted to form an armed group.
She said that she was held because her husband, Faustin Rukundo, is a senior member of the Rwanda National Congress, an opposition group which has branches around the world.
“I was scared I was going to lose my baby. It was terrible,” she told The Times. “The charges against me were all lies. They knew I didn’t do politics, I didn’t do Hutu and Tutsi, tribal discrimination. They found nothing on my phone. They were holding me because of my husband, that’s all.”
Mrs Uwamahoro was released after a high court judge ruled there was no evidence to keep her and prosecutors agreed to let her return home. Her account is rare since most political prisoners in Rwanda are never released.
The British high commission in Kigali had repeatedly asked the Rwandan government about Mrs Uwamahoro’s whereabouts and was told that she had not been detained. The deputy high commissioner was finally allowed to visit her in police custody on March 3.
Mrs Uwamahoro, who has two older children aged eight and ten, was seized at a coach station in Kigali as she waited for a bus to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, from where she planned to catch a flight home to Britain. She said she was taken to an unknown location where four men questioned her about her husband’s activities and contacts in Rwanda and asked her to become a government informant.
President Kagame’s regime has traditionally been one of the UK’s largest aid recipients in Africa but relations have been strained by what human rights groups say is a state-sponsored programme of repression which included assassination attempts on British soil.
A spokesman for the Rwandan government had not responded to questions at the time of going to press.
By Aislinn Laing
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/pregnant-briton-s-two-week-interrogation-ordeal-in-rwanda-pdxs9mjpt