Rwandan President Paul Kagame said he would support...

Rwandan President Paul Kagame said he would support abolishing the death penalty for genocide suspects held by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, if the prisoners were to be transferred to Rwandan national jurisdiction.
"My position has always been to have these people tried from where they committed the crime; then survivals of the genocide would see justice being delivered," he told reporters in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. "If it means doing way with the death penalty, I will support it."
The tribunal's prosecutor, Hassan Jallow, was under pressure to meet the UN Security Council's deadline of ending his investigations in 2004 and completing all trials by 2008.
The death penalty had been a sticking point in transferring cases to Rwanda. The highest sentence a UN tribunal could issue was life imprisonment.
Relations between Kigali and the tribunal had been strained with the former prosecutor, Carl Del Ponte, expressing her intention to arrest Tutsi army officers aligned with Rwanda's current government.
So far, the only officers the tribunal had indicted were members of the former Hutu government, which had been blamed for the genocide.