© APPatrick Karegeya was found dead, possibly strangled, in a hotel in South Africa, police said.
Come New Year's Day, denizens of the Johannesburg hotel could scarcely have dreamed of the horror unfolding upstairs in one of its luxurious rooms. Patrick Karegeya, a former spy chief in Rwanda living in exile in South Africa, was murdered. Later the room's safe revealed a bloodied towel and a rope, implying that Karegeya had been strangled.
As police began searching for a motive and culprit, Karegeya's fellow Rwandan dissidents were in no doubt: they immediately described it as a political assassination carried out on the orders of the country's president, Paul Kagame. It fitted a pattern, they claimed, of previous killings and disappearances of his opponents in South Africa and elsewhere.
Karegeya, 53, was once a close ally of Kagame and served as Rwanda's intelligence chief for 10 years before he was arrested and jailed for 18 months for insubordination and desertion. He fled the country after he was stripped of his rank of colonel in 2006. His political associates said he had gone to the Michelangelo hotel on Wednesday to meet a Rwandan man who had posed as a friend of the opposition.
Comment: Have you noticed there's always enough money for drones?