By David Himbara
In a CNN interview on February 17, 2021 Rwandan head of state General Paul Kagame boasted on how flawlessly Paul Rusesabagina was abducted from Dubai to Rwanda. As Kagame gloated, Rusesabagina fell in a well-executed trap. The Kagame government recruited a Rusesabagina’s “friend” to lure him to board an executive flight to Rwanda, via the big lie that Rusesabagina was flying to Burundi to attend an important meeting. This is how Kagame famously and ceaselessly traps his victims. The killing of Seif Bamporiki followed this well-established style of luring victims to entrapment or death.
In the case of Seif Bamporiki, hours before he was killed in Cape Town on February 21, 2021, he received a call from a “customer” seeking an urgent service. The would-be customer was not seeking a service, however; he was on a mission to kill. In other words, Bamporiki was lured from his house on Sunday afternoon to his untimely death.
While the exact circumstances of Bamporiki’s killing are yet to be determined, his murder is very much in the Kagame style. His victims are routinely lured by people planted to organize the killing or the kidnapping. Recall the failed assassination attempts of General Kayumba Nyamwasa, the former Rwandan Army Chief of Staff exiled in South Africa. Nyamwasa was shot and severely wounded in 2010 and in 2012 by the would-be assassins who had connived with people around him.
Similarly, Colonel Patrick Karegeya, the former Rwandan Intelligence Chief was strangled to death in a well-executed operation. In this case, Karegeya’s “friend” Apolo Kiririsi Gafararanga was sent from Rwanda to South Africa to lure Karegeya to his death on December 31, 2013. South African courts subsequently linked the Karegeya and Nyamwasa cases to the Kagame Government. In 2019, South Africa’s Prosecution Authority issued arrest warrants for Apolo Kiririsi Gafararanga and a co-conspirator whom the court determined killed Karegeya on the Kagame government instructions.
General Kagame does not hide his belief of targeting his political adversaries. To the contrary, Kagame gloats about the brutal killings and kidnapping he unleashes. He condoned Karegeya’s murder in at the National Prayer Breakfast in Kigali, Rwanda, on January 12, 2014, in these chilling words: “Any person still alive who may be plotting against Rwanda, whoever they are, will pay the price…Whoever it is, it is a matter of time.”