Beginning on April 8, 1994, Tutsi escapees – hunted and terrified – fled to the Catholic church in Nyange, a rural parish in western Rwanda. They sought shelter from attacks incited by Hutu extremists. The attackers were determined to eliminate the Tutsi as an ethnic group and killed individual Tutsi as a means to this end.

The Nyange church soon filled with over two thousand huddled Tutsi, many of whom were wounded. These Tutsi initially thought the church, as a house of God, would be a refuge. In fact, they had been encouraged to hide there by parish priests. The priests, however, decided to demolish the church. Accordingly, workers were engaged to operate a mechanical digger.

On April 16, 1994, a worker named Anastase Nkinamubanzi bulldozed the church with the Tutsi crammed inside. The roof crashed down. A few Tutsi survived the razing of the church. Nearly one-third of the local Hutu population assembled to finish them off. They did so with machetes, spears, and sticks.

Four years later, a Rwandan court prosecuted six individuals on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for the Nyange church massacre. Nkinamubanzi was among the accused. From the case report, we learn that he was born in 1962, was a bachelor, and worked as a heavy equipment driver. Nkinamubanzi had no assets. He had no prior criminal record.