The U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal for Rwanda has sentenced former mayor Gregoire Ndahimana to 15 years in prison. Ndahimana was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with the killing of more than 2,000 Tutsi refugees in his village in 1994. The atrocity was just one of many that occurred in that African nation against tribal villagers that year.

Ndahimana failed to prevent police from bulldozing a Catholic church in Nyange, where 2,000 people were in hiding. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda also found that he assisted in the following massacre.

"The chamber ... found Ndahimana guilty of genocide and extermination by aiding and abetting as well as by virtue of his command responsibility over communal police in the Kivumu prefecture," the court said in a statement.

"The presence of the accused at the scene of the crime had an encouraging effect on the attack."

Born in 1952, Ndahimana was sentenced after the tribunal dismissed an additional charge of complicity in genocide. He had previously pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Prosecutors had previously alleged that the former mayor had planned and ordered the massacre at Nyange and opened fire personally to begin the massacre. Those allegations were dismissed when the judges declared that they had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Ndahimana is the third person to be tried and convicted by the ICTR for the killing at Nyange.

Based in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, the ICTR was established to try the key perpetrators of the genocide which claimed some 800,000 lives, mainly minority Tutsis, in a span of 100 days.

The court said the scale of the operation that led to the destruction of the church and the murder of thousands of
Tutsis reflected a broad co-ordination by local and religious authorities.

"Though this did in no way exonerate the accused, it did, however, suggest that his participation through aiding and abetting may have resulted from duress rather than from extremism or ethnic hatred," the court said.

In June, The U.N. Court trying suspects of the 1994 Rwanda genocide found a female former government minister and her son both guilty of war crimes on Friday and gave both life sentences, marking the first time a woman has been convicted of genocide.

Both Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Rwanda's former minister for family and women affairs, and her son, Arsene Ntahobali, a former militia leader, were both found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape.

The court found that the mother and son helped to abduct hundreds of ethnic Tutsis who were assaulted, raped and killed in the southern region of Butare.

Nyiramasuhuko is the only woman to be charged before the special genocide court. The people responsible for this horrific crime against humanity are slowly being brought to justice