

The family of the murdered former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya celebrated on Thursday after a South African magistrate said the identities of four suspects were known and police said they were “directly linked” to Rwanda’s government.

At the end of a 20-minute inquest in Johannesburg, the magistrate Mashiane Mathopa said there was a prima facie case to answer and he was sending the matter to South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). Karegeya was found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel room in January 2014.

Written testimony from South Africa’s special investigative unit, the Hawks, was submitted as part of the inquest. The Hawks had been asked by the magistrate to explain what steps it had taken to secure the arrest of the four suspects in the past five years.

In a statement, the Hawks investigating officer Kwena Motlhamme said Karegeya’s murder, along with several attacks in Johannesburg on Rwanda’s exiled army chief of staff Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa “were directly linked to the involvement of the Rwandan government”.

Revealing he had been summoned by the South African parliament to brief its security committee at the time, Motlhamme said relations between South Africa and Rwanda were put under pressure as a result, with both countries withdrawing their ambassadors. Rwanda and South Africa did not have an extradition treaty, he said. “These facts made it very impossible for any attempt to locate the suspects from their country of origin,” he said.

The lawyer representing Karegeya’s family said he found the police statement “very weak” and he had never heard of a parliamentary committee being briefed on a murder investigation before. “The only inference one can draw is that there must be political interference … We said the first time it was an abuse of process. The court said we were right,” said Gerrie Nel.

Patrick Karegeya’s wife, Leah, at court proceedings. Photograph: Jhua-nine Wyrley-Birch/Michela Wrong

Karegeya and Nyamwasa were once high-ranking members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which seized power in Kigali in 1994 after a genocide in which nearly 1 million people, most of them minority Tutsis, were killed. They fled after separately falling out with the president, Paul Kagame, and set up an opposition party in exile, the Rwanda National Congress.

Thursday’s ruling came less than a fortnight after Rwanda marked the 25th anniversary of the genocide at a solemn ceremony attended by global dignitaries. “Rwanda is a family again,” Kagame said as he lit a flame of hope.

Human rights organisations have claimed no dissent is permitted in modern Rwanda, and that Karegeya and Nyamwasa were only the most high-profile targets in a concerted campaign of killings, arrests and disappearances among politicians, civil society activists and journalists both inside the country and abroad.

Karegeya’s widow, Leah, who flew in from her home in Washington for the ruling, pointed to the long delay in holding an inquest as evidence of top-level meddling in the judicial process. “We know our government and how they work. Our government has never ceased to interfere.”

David Batenga, Karegeya’s nephew, said it marked the start of a process to bring his uncle’s killers to justice. “We will fight on. We intend to go all the way,” he said.

Nel, a former public prosecutor best known for being involved in the Oscar Pistorius case, said he would give the NPA three months to respond and then consider launching a private prosecution. Two years ago Nel resigned from his prosecutor’s job to launch private prosecutions on behalf of AfriForum, a minority rights lobby group.

The Rwandan high commissioner to South Africa, Vincent Karega, did not respond to requests for comment, but in the past Kigali has always denied having anything to do with Karegeya’s murder and a total of four attempts on Nyamwasa’s life, while simultaneously branding the two men “terrorists”.