Karegeya daughter gets ICC job

Portia Mbabazi Karegeya, a daughter to slain Rwanda ex-spy chief Patrick Karegeya, has landed a job with the International Criminal Court (ICC), a source has said.

According to the source, Ms Karegeya is set to take up her new job in The Hague, Netherlands, soon.

By press time the EagleOnline was unable to establish under which department Ms Karegeya will work under, but the ICC has placements for internship under the Registry, Chambers, Office of the Prosecutor and the Sarajevo Office.

Before her father’s death on January 1, 2014, Ms Karegeya’s name had come to the spotlight in 2012 after Rwanda cancelled her citizenship and she also had her Ugandan passport withdrawn by immigration officials at Entebbe International Airport as she tried to fly to Johannesburg, South Africa for under graduate studies.

Born and partly raised in Uganda, Ms Karegeya, 27, holds a Masters at Law degree obtained from McGill University in Quebec, Canada and is one of three siblings born to Patrick (RIP) and Leah Karegeya.

A former Colonel in the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), Karegeya, a very instrumental espionage official during the ‘second Congo war’ between 1998 and 2003, fell out with the establishment in Rwanda in 2005. Subsequently he was imprisoned and on release, was stripped of his military ranks and dismissed with disgrace, effectively making him an almost ‘undesirable’ civilian.

In 2006 he was to flee to exile in South Africa, in the process linking up with another Rwandan dissident officer-cum-diplomat, former RPA Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa, who had also earlier fled Rwanda after falling out with President Paul Kagame.

The late Karegeya, whose death caused a diplomatic row between Rwanda and South Africa, was strangled in a hotel room in the leafy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton on New Year’s Day in 2014.