A Belgian jury has found two Rwandan half-brothers guilty of helping Hutu militias slaughter some 50,000 people during a 1994 genocide in their country that killed hundreds of thousands.
The jury gave its verdict last night after some 12 hours of deliberations, finding the two men guilty of nearly all charges made against them.
Prosecutors had accused businessmen Etienne Nzabonimana and Samuel Ndashyikirwa of supplying extremist Hutus with vehicles and weapons for their bloody rampages and plying them with beer after their killing sprees.
Michele Hirsch, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, expressed relief over the verdict. "What we witnessed was something really extraordinary," she told local RTBF radio.
"They (the plaintiffs) were mostly women because it was women who survived the genocide, because they were raped while the men were killed."
The pair, who were successful businessmen in their home towns of Kibungo and Kirwa in the country's southeast, had insisted on their innocence. Sentencing is expected today.
Court officials were unavailable for comment. Nzabonimana and Ndashyikirwa were tried under a controversial law that empowers Belgium's courts to try war crimes suspects even if they are not Belgian and their crimes were committed abroad.
Suspects must be resident in Belgium, Rwanda's colonial master before the African country gained independence in 1962. This is the second trial under the law, following a high-profile case in 2001 in which four Rwandans, including two nuns, were convicted for their role in their country's genocide.
The country is still recovering from the three-month bloodbath that wiped out an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus from a population of about 8 million.