A court in western Rwanda sentenced a Chinese national named Sun Shujun to 20 years in prison in recent days after finding him guilty of torturing at least two Rwandan miners in August 2021, Rwanda’s the New Times newspaper reported Wednesday.
Video footage appearing to show Sun whipping two Rwandan men as they were tied to a tree circulated online last August. Rwandan authorities subsequently investigated the video’s content and confirmed that the incident took place in Rwanda’s Western Province at a Chinese-managed mine.
The Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) arrested Sun and two other employees of the mine accused of participating in the torture, an engineer named Alexis Renzaho and a security guard Leonidas Nsanzimana, sometime last year before prosecuting them for their crimes. Rwanda’s Gihango Primary Court remanded the three men in September 2021. The group then appealed to the Karongi Intermediate Court, according to the New Times.
“Shujun was given bail but court ordered the seizure of his passport in addition to a bail fee of Rwf10 million [sic],” the newspaper recalled on Wednesday, adding, “The co-accused were denied bail and remained in custody.”
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“During the ruling on April 19, 2022, Renzaho was handed 12 years in jail as an accomplice and Nsanzimana was acquitted,” the New Times reported.
Sun told the Karongi Intermediary Court that the two men he was filmed beating “had stolen minerals from his company, Ali Group Holdings Ltd,” Voice of America relayed on April 20, citing Rwanda’s KT Press.
The New Times reported on April 20 that there were “three victims” of Sun’s torture, while Voice of America and other news outlets reported that there were two.
Chinese companies operate mines throughout Rwanda and greater Africa as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The program allows the Chinese government to fund infrastructure projects in developing nations and thus expand the Chinese Communist Party’s influence across the globe. BRI-funded mines across Africa have often produced tension between the facility’s Chinese managers and African laborers.
A Chinese coal mine manager in Zimbabwe shot and injured two of the mine’s Zimbabwean workers in June 2020 after the Africans confronted the manager concerning wages they were owed. The shooting reportedly left one of the victims permanently disabled.
The Chinese-owned Premier Estate mining site in eastern Zimbabwe called off a search for ten illegal Zimbabwean gold miners in late November 2020, claiming the excavation equipment used to conduct the rescue operation was too “expensive” to continue using. The tragic episode ostensibly left the group of African miners “buried alive” inside a mine shaft after they were accidentally trapped there earlier that same month.