Known modus

We can’t rule out either country as the source of the dead. And whichever country produced the bodies, the actual cause of the victims’ deaths is very likely political in nature.

Burundi has had similar cases in the past few years, when opposition politicians turned up dead and floating in rivers. Political activists suffer frequent attacks and suppression at the hands of the regime of president Pierre Nkurunziza, who is gearing up for elections in 2015.

But many of those who saw the bodies have said that the river Nyabarongo, which originates in Rwanda, carried the corpses into Lake Rweru. According to one report, the river normally terminates in a swamp, which would have swallowed the corpses.

But the swamp is dry due to a recent drought, so the bodies floated onward into Lake Rweru.

If this is true, it could mean that Rwanda’s leadership at least tolerated the murders. Rwandan intelligence services and police are infamous for their close-knit networks of snitches. Somewhat unusually for an African state, the government in Kigali is highly organized, right down to the local level—and even has access to a biometrics database of all citizens.

It’s highly unlikely that the Rwandan police force—whose commissioner general once convincingly boasted to War is Boring that his patrolmen could even find a stolen laptop—wouldn’t notice 40 murders. It’s even more unlikely that the Rwandan security forces wouldn’t know the killers’ identities.

Similarly to his counterpart Nkurunziza, Rwandan president Paul Kagame is currently preparing for his country’s next presidential election in 2017. Kagame hasn’t yet declared his intention to run for a third term in office, which would necessitate an overhaul of the constitution.

But there are indications that he’s preparing for such a move. In recent years several prominent critiques of Kagame’s regime have been killed abroad and at home, while Rwandan authorities have arrested others on sometimes flimsy charges.

Lake Rweru’s dead might be other victims of this campaign to silence internal dissent.