Suspects in massacre seek U.S. asylum

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.

Brutal killings

In court documents, U.S. prosecutors called the killings “brutal,” saying they were intended as part of a conspiracy to send a message to the United States that it should not support the Rwandan government. The indictment declared that Mrs. Miller had been raped and that the assault was both an “overt act” of the conspiracy and a “manner and means of effecting the conspiracy.”

Court records show that the eight English-speaking tourists who perished in the park appear to have been killed in three separate attacks: Mr. Haubner was among three men killed in a first incident, followed by a man and a woman at a second location and then three women at still another site. The third attack claimed the life of Mrs. Miller.

The records show that two of the victims were found with handwritten notes on or near their bodies. One read: “This is the punishment of the Anglo-Saxon who sold us. You protect the minority and oppress the majority.”

The seven hostages who survived, among them American Mark Ross, were given a note by the Liberation Army commander with instructions to deliver it to the U.S. ambassador. It read, “People cannot ignore our problem. You have supported the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in oppressing and massacring the Hutus without constraint. … All Africans know your imperialist secret.”

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