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Rwandan hack jailed for life over radio exhortations to slaughter

A Rwandan radio journalist has admitted she encouraged ethnic Hutus to slaughter Tutsis during the 1994 genocide, which killed up to 800,000 people in three months. Now Valerie Bemeriki has been jailed for life. Radio broadcasts were infamously used to incite the hatred. The BBC says Bemeriki once told listeners: "Do not kill those cockroaches with a bullet - cut them to pieces with a machete".  She was a prominent voice on Radio Mille Collines, which was launched in 1993 by relatives of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death in a plane crash helped to spark the mass murder. Another two senior members of the station were earlier sentenced to long jail terms by the UN genocide tribunal based in Arusha, Tanzania. But this time a local court convicted Bemeriki of planning genocide and complicity in several murders. Read more: BBC, Gendercide Watch

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