Rwanda marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the 1994 genocide yesterday by reburying the remains of 20,000 people slaughtered in a church in the southern commune of Kibeho.
Tension was high with a survivor, Mr Jean-Baptiste Ntezyryrayo, accusing Bishop Misago, the local Catholic bishop, of involvement, and a Protestant minister expressing remorse for the Church's failure to protect the up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by machete-wielding Hutu extremists.
In Arusha, Tanzania, officials said that three former Rwandan government ministers implicated in the genocide had been arrested. The United Nations court prosecuting architects of the genocide said they were arrested on Tuesday in Cameroon, where they fled after their regime was forced from power in 1994.
They include former foreign minister Mr Jerome Bicamumpaka and former commerce minister Mr Justin Mugenzi, who allegedly played key roles in inciting ethnic Hutus to attack Rwanda's Tutsi minority and in justifying the slaughter to the world.
Human rights groups have accused Mr Mugenzi of urging Hutus in a series of radio broadcasts to "kill all the Tutsis," and of travelling around the country to stir up ethnic hatred.
"If the population gets angry it should be allowed to do what it wants," he allegedly told one meeting in the southern prefecture of Butare. He also allegedly distributed machetes to local militiamen for use in the massacres.
Mr Bicamumpaka defended the government on trips to Paris and the United Nations in New York, where he told the Security Council that the violence was entirely the fault of Tutsi rebels.
He also claimed Tutsis were not the only victims, saying they were attacking their Hutu neighbours.
The third suspect arrested in Cameroon is Mr Prosper Mugiraneza, who ran Rwanda's civil service in the interim government set up in the first days of the genocide.
The UN court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), said in a statement released late on Tuesday that Cameroon police had arrested all three men earlier in the day and that they would soon be transferred to the ICTR.
Rwanda's genocide began just hours after President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed in a rocket attack on his aircraft. The assassination was apparently ordered by Hutu extremists within the government and the armed forces. Within hours they mobilised civilian militias to begin butchering Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
A Tutsi-led rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, seized power in July 1994 and ended the genocide.
In Kibeho, Mr Ntezyryrayo told President Pasteur Bizimungu and other leaders of the Rwandan national unity government, which includes both Tutsis and Hutus: "The killers remain in the hills - we only go there in daytime for fear of being killed."
Bishop Misago remained silent as the witness said: "Ask him what happened to the young girls he took away in his car one day, and who disappeared."
The Protestant minister acknowledged that "during the genocide, the Church neither condemned the massacres nor protected the victims. We apologised in 1996, and I apologise again."
At the start of the killing Rwanda had a population of seven million - 85 per cent Hutu, 14 per cent Tutsi, and one per cent pygmoid Twa. As the rebel Tutsis won the war, more than two million Hutus fled into exile in neighbouring countries.
They included members of the defeated Hutu army and Interahamwe militias, who have been waging a guerrilla war against the new Tutsi-dominated authorities ever since. The economy remains in tatters.
Rwanda's Tutsi-dominated army is meanwhile fighting across the border alongside rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in large part to eliminate Hutu guerrilla rear-bases there.
Flags are flying at half-mast throughout Rwanda this week, and radio and television are broadcasting programmes dedicated to the killing.
Some 125,000 suspects are being held in overcrowded jails on suspicion of taking part in the genocide. Twenty two were convicted and executed in public by firing squads in April last year and in neighbouring Tanzania a UN tribunal is trying alleged ring leaders.
It has so far handed down two life sentences and one 15-year term.
The ICTR has already tried and convicted three genocide suspects, sentencing two of them to life and the other to 15 years in prison. It has 38 suspects in its custody.