Former Catholic priest jailed for Rwanda genocide

NAIROBI, Dec 13 (Reuters) A UN court trying the top leaders of Rwanda's 1994 genocide jailed a former Catholic priest for 15 years today for ordering bulldozers to level a church, killing 2,000 people who were hiding inside.

Father Athanase Seromba had denied the charges, including genocide and crimes against humanity, before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania.

''He has been jailed for 15 years,'' ICTR spokesman Everard O'Donnell told Reuters by telephone from the court.

The tribunal heard Seromba ordered the destruction of a church where more than 2,000 minority ethnic Tutsis were hiding from machete-wielding gangs of ethnic Hutu militia.

After the roof of the building collapsed, witnesses said militiamen swarmed over the rubble to finish off the survivors.

The former priest is the 27th person to be convicted by the ICTR, which is prosecuting the perpetrators of the genocide that claimed some 800,000 lives in just 100 days. It has acquitted five suspects since its first trial in 1997.

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