A nine-year-old Rwandan boy who has confessed to murdering at least three other children, and whose own father is in prison facing charges of genocide, will be sent to a re-education camp, police said.
Authorities in the south-eastern Cyangugu district said on Wednesday that the boy confessed to killing a three-year-old girl with a club and stones before throwing her body into a latrine where it was later found.
The child "has also admitted to other murders. He cut the throat of one victim and has said he strangled another child and suffocated or drowned" more youngsters, according to Radio Rwanda.
"When I killed, it was as if a force inside was pushing me to do it," the boy said on the state radio, after he was denounced by another child and taken into custody on Tuesday by police.
According to specialist non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such cases are only too frequent in the central African country, where many children witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 people in 1994.
A local gendarmerie chief said the boy was being detained for the murder to which he had confessed. "The local people caught him after another child denounced him," the officer added said.
"Apart from the little girl, he has confessed to killing two other children with knives or in boiling water, while witnesses tell us that he tortured some of his comrades."
It was not immediately clear exactly how many killings were attributed to the boy, but Handicap International, one of the NGOs helping people traumatised by the genocide that wracked Rwanda between April and July 1994, said such incidents were not uncommon.
A psychologist said: "We often see cases like this, which correspond to an identification with the aggressor."
The gendarmerie chief said police were "following a procedure to ensure that the boy is sent to a re-education camp", adding that "he cannot go on trial because he is too young".
Rwanda has issued an international warrant for the arrest of Mr Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, accused of genocide but freed on procedural grounds by the UN tribunal, the Justice Minister, Mr Jean-de-Dieu Mucyo, said yesterday in Kigali. On November 3rd, the appeals court of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which tries key suspects in the genocide, released Mr Barayagwiza on the basis that the prosecution had not informed him of the charges against him or extradited him from Cameroon in time. The suspect, who was foreign ministry director of political affairs and also a member of the steering committee of the Mille Collines "hate radio" station during the killings, is accused of being one of the architects of the slaughter of up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderates of the Hutu majority.