Home > News > Energy

Suspects in massacre seek U.S. asylum

After charges dropped, Rwandans ask for haven

By Jerry Seper and Jim McElhatton, THE WASHINGTON TIMES | Sunday, August 17, 2008

Article
Comments ()

Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff announced the March 2003 arrests with much fanfare: Three Rwandan rebels had confessed to brutally killing two American tourists on a safari vacation in a Ugandan national park four years earlier and would finally be brought to the United States to stand trial in the savage deaths.

Francois Karake, Gregoire Nyaminani and Leonidas Bimenyimana, all members of the Liberation Army of Rwanda, had been indicted a week earlier by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., on charges of murder and conspiracy in the killings of Robert Haubner, 48, and his wife, Susan Miller, 42, in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park on March 1, 1999.

The American couple, who worked for Intel Corp. in Portland, Ore., where they also lived, had been kidnapped by more than 150 Rwandan rebels who scouted the rugged park in southwestern Uganda for several days, targeting for death more than a dozen English-speaking tourists.

The couple had been visiting - for the third time, counting their honeymoon - one of the richest ecosystems in Africa, the home to nearly 1,000 species of mammals, birds, trees, ferns, frogs and geckos, and a sanctuary for the Bwindi gorillas, which holds about half of the world's population of the critically endangered animal.

Bwindi is a remote, rain-forest area in the extreme southwestern region of Uganda near the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. It was a place the Oregon couple had come to love.

But in a brutal killing frenzy, the couple and 13 other unsuspecting travelers were kidnapped and force-marched into the jungle, where the two Americans and six other tourists - four British citizens and two New Zealanders - were savagely beaten, hacked and bludgeoned to death with axes and machetes.

Their Ugandan guide was burned alive.

"This indictment should serve as a warning," said Mr. Chertoff, who at the time headed the Justice Department's criminal division. "Those who commit acts of terror against Americans will be hunted, captured and brought to justice."

That ominous warning was never followed up. After a judge ruled the confessions inadmissible in 2006, the case fell apart.

Now, the three Rwandans are seeking political asylum in the United States and, ironically, Mr. Chertoff has moved from Justice to Homeland Security, where as secretary he now oversees the agency that must decide whether to grant those requests.