A doctor accused of a number of offences relating to the 1994 Rwanda genocide is set to face trial in autumn next year. Dr Vincent Brown, formerly Dr Vincent Bajinya, 65, is accused of "killing, directing or encouraging" the deaths of members of the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda. He is the first person in the UK to have been charged over the genocide.
Brown, of Islington, north London, is charged with one count of conduct ancillary to genocide and six offences of conduct ancillary to murder as a crime against humanity. A judge has now set his provisional trial date to begin in October 2027. He denies wrongdoing and has not yet entered a plea.
The defendant appeared via video link from Belmarsh prison on Friday for a pre-trial hearing at the Old Bailey during which Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb set a provisional eight to 12-week trial from October 4 2027. A plea and case management hearing has also been set for 15 January. He has indicated he will plead not guilty to the charges against him.
An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during the 1994 Rwanda genocide which lasted for 100 days. Brown is a medical doctor who qualified in Rwanda in the 1980s. He later became head of the country's Department of Family Health in Kigali and lived in a suburb there with his wife and young son.
Between April 6 and 13 1994, he was allegedly a party to six murders and was later charged following a seven-year British investigation into the killings. The court heard on Friday that a £100,000 bail condition, imposed earlier in October, had not yet been met. Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones KC told the court the events in 1994 were "the most devastating wave of mass killing in modern history".
Jones said: "One hundred thousand were murdered in Kigali especially in the first days and weeks of the genocide."
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