[RwandaLibre] Leah Karegeya: "I always worried about his safety"

Leah Karegeya: "I always worried about his safety"



January 4 2014 at 12:15pm

By Sheree Bega

AP



Slain ex-spy scrapped SA security detail





Johannesburg - By the time the clock struck midnight on New Year's

Eve, Leah Karegeya knew something was wrong. There was no message from

her husband to welcome in 2014 and her increasingly frantic calls to

him remained unanswered.



"We skyped and talked every single day," said the US-based Leah of her

relationship with her husband, Colonel Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda's

former spy chief, who had been living in exile in South Africa since

2007.



"We skyped that morning. I told him I was going to have a meal with

our boys and he told me to drive safely and SMS him when we arrived."



He never replied. "It was unlike him. We started thinking something

was wrong. Then when there was no message from him on New Year's Eve,

I knew something bad had happened to him."



Hours later she would hear of the painful details of his murder in a

hotel room at the luxury Michelangelo Towers hotel in Sandton.



His killers reportedly spiked his drink with poison and, when that

failed, strangled him with a rope from a curtain in the hotel room.

But in some ways, Leah said, she had always braced herself for this

moment.



"It's a big shock but I always worried about his safety, that

something bad was going to happen.



"They tried several times… to end his life. They had been trying for

quite some time.



"But we always managed to escape. It's shocking but at the same time

it's expected… I'm just so sad at the way they killed him. I wish they

would have just shot him, not killed him so brutally," she said, her

voice quivering.



Karegeya was a key figure in the Rwandan opposition, and Leah believes

he was murdered by agents of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, his former

ally. Her turning point came when former Rwandan army chief and

friend, Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, another Rwandan

dissident, survived two assassination attempts in Joburg in June 2010.

"After that we were taken to safe houses… I had to leave my husband

alone in South Africa and take my children away from there."



She fled with the couple's three children to a small town in Tennessee.



"This is how the president (Kagame) works. He always has people

monitoring you. But I feel safe here. I didn't in South Africa. I

can't go anywhere else… I know it is him. This is what he does to

anyone who opposes his government. It is a terrible life we have to

live."



She and other Rwandan dissidents believe a man named Appollo Kiririsi

Gafaranga, a Rwandan businessman, is linked to the murder. Karegeya

was meeting Gafaranga at the hotel. "I saw him once. He was a friend

of my husband, a businessman from Rwanda. We knew him from working

with the government.



"He had known my husband for a long time. I think Rwanda was using

him, for my husband to think he was fine, but he was monitoring my

husband's movements and waiting for the right opportunity to murder

him," she said.



She wants to bury her husband in Uganda, his birthplace.



The couple were married for 25 years and she said she would miss his

laugh the most.



"He was a man of integrity. He fought for justice, he wanted people to

live in harmony, to have rights. They have taken his life but I am

grateful that he died for what he fought for. I'm glad people know

that about him," she said. - Saturday Star



http://www.thepost.co.za/i-always-worried-about-his-safety-1.1628531





--

SIBOMANA Jean Bosco

Google+: https://plus.google.com/110493390983174363421/posts

YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9B4024D0AE764F3D

http://www.youtube.com/user/sibomanaxyz999

***Transmission Time Interval (TTI) on Saturday January 4th, 2014:

TTI=13H54-20H30, heure de Montréal.***Fuseau horaire domestique: heure

normale de la côte Est des Etats-Unis et Canada (GMT-05:00)***





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