NGOMA: With shovels and garden hoes, villagers dig where a house once stood in Rwanda to reveal a mass grave filled with bones — victims of the genocide still being found 30 years on.Around 100 volunteers, many wearing face masks and rubber gloves, turn over the red soil in Ngoma village with a sombre determination as a crowd watches on from a slope above.Skulls, teeth and other shards of bone are placed carefully into plastic bags while shoes and tattered clothing — possible clues to identify loved ones never found — are collected elsewhere.Every time they dig deeper, they find more layers of soil with remains,” Andre Kamana, deputy mayor of the Huye district, said grimly.A total of 210 bodies have been discovered, an official from the genocide survivors’ group Ibuka told AFP on Monday as digging on the site ended after a week of exhumations.And in the same village, another search began on Monday in a nearby banana plantation, where the remains of 35 people have been discovered so far. “We will continue searching here as well, until we are satisfied that all remains are discovered,” one of the volunteers, Goreth Uwonkunda, told AFP.The discovery of mass graves are remarkably frequent even three decades after the 1994 slaughter instigated by the Hutu extremist regime in Rwanda at the time.The United Nations estimates around 800,000 people, mostly from the Tutsi minority, were killed over 100 days in an ethnic pogrom that turned neighbour on neighbour in the tiny east African nation.’Family secret’In Ngoma, about three hours’ drive from the capital Kigali, roadblocks were erected and Tutsi dragged from their cars and murdered, said Goreth Uwonkunda, a 52-year-old who has lived her entire life in the village.”The history here is terrible… this is clearly one of the mass graves where they were dumped,” she told AFP referring to the first site where 210 bodies have been discovered.”The killers buried victims on top of others. We found big bones, some intact, even whole skulls.”The mass grave was discovered beneath a family home. Five of the family members have been arrested on suspicion of complicity in genocide and concealment of evidence.The investigation began last October when a whistleblower tipped off the authorities about the likelihood of a mass grave on the unremarkable rural property on a hillside off a main road.”It is suspected that those who lived in that house knew what was underneath them, and it was a family secret,” Ibuka president Napthali Ahishakiye told AFP.The appalling discovery has horrified those living near the graves all these years.”I knew the people who lived in this house, and I am quite shocked that they comfortably slept on top of bodies every night and were alright with it. It is shameful and shocking,” said Uwonkunda.
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