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KIGALI, April 6 (AFP) - Rwandan authorities have freed two journalists and the president of a human rights association detained on political charges, well-informed sources said Monday.
Jean-Pierre Mugabe, editor of the independent periodical Le Tribun du Peuple was arrested in January 3 and jailed in a first court hearing for four years for insulting the head of state, General-Major Juvenal Habyarimana.
The offence arose from a published cartoon.
Andre Kameya, director of the independent Rwanda Rushya (New Rwanda), had been held at Kigali prison from February 24 after his periodical published an article claiming that armed opponents to the government of neighbouring Burundi were training in southern Rwanda.
Kameya is head of the information and documentation commission in the opposition Liberal Party.
Both men were provisionally released on Friday with the human rights activist Fidele Kanyabugoyi, the sources said.
Kanyabugoyi has irritated the government by his foreign contacts and by pursuing an investigation into massacres of Rwanda's minority Tutsi people in the southeast and north of the country.
The majority Hutus early in March attacked Tutsis in the southeast of the small densely populated mountain nation. Officials said 152 people died, but local sources and human rights groups put the toll at several hundred.
Kanyabugoyi told AFP that after his arrest, security officials seized many documents at his home concerning the killings of Tutsis and civil warfare in northern Rwanda between government troops and rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), who invaded from neighbouring Uganda in October 1990.
Many in the FPR ranks were long-exiled Tutsis who had served in the Ugandan army.
Still in prison Monday was the editor of the satirical paper Nyabarongo, arrested on February 25. Theoneste Muberantwali was detained after the paper published a cartoon of Habyarimana throwing a map of Rwanda into an abyss.
mgu/nb/gk AFP AFP SEQN-0256
