On the evening of Tuesday, September 5, 2023, the Rwanda Investigation Bureau announced on X that it had arrested a man in Kicukiro District, on the southeastern side of Kigali. He was Denis Kazungu, 34, and he rented a small house standing on its own in Gashikiri village, in Busanza Cell, Kanombe Sector. Investigators had found a pit dug in the kitchen of that house. In it were the bodies of people he had killed. Within days the house was torn down so the remains could be taken out.
Kazungu had already been in police custody once that summer. Women had escaped from the house and told neighbors what happened there. Neighbors had reported it. None of that had stopped him. In March 2024 he pleaded guilty to ten charges, including the murder of 13 people, and was sentenced to life in prison. A representative of one victim's family later told the High Court that apart from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, it was rare in Rwanda's history to find one person who had killed so many people alone.
This account is drawn from reporting in The New Times of Rwanda and KT Press, from statements by the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB) and the National Public Prosecution Authority (NPPA) as quoted in those papers, and from Agence France-Presse. No court judgment has been published online that could be checked for this page.
Very little is on the public record about Kazungu's early life. He told local officials he was an orphan, and his lawyer later told the High Court that he had been orphaned young. Antoine Mutsinzi, the executive administrator of Kicukiro District, told The New Times a few days after the arrest that nothing much was known about his family, friends or support network.
What was known came largely from Kazungu himself and from papers found in his house. He had a secondary school education. He said he had run his own school as a business in the Remera area of Kigali, holding evening classes and teaching English. At his appeal in 2025 his lawyer said it had been a baby class, a creche for orphans, started in 2009, and that it closed in 2016. After that, the lawyer said, Kazungu went into cross-border trade in liquor. In 2018, by his own account, he lost goods worth $120,000 at the border between Uganda and Kenya. In court he presented that loss as the point at which he turned to crime.
Among his documents, Mutsinzi said, were a passport showing trips to Kenya and Uganda and a contract for work as a security guard at a Marriott hotel in Dubai. There was no evidence he had ever traveled to the United Arab Emirates. Investigators also believed he had lived earlier in Gasabo District, as a tenant in an apartment in the part of Kimironko known locally as Kwa Rwahama. Mutsinzi said investigators would look at his former homes to see whether anything similar had happened there.
The house where the killings took place was in a thinly built part of Busanza, surrounded mostly by undeveloped plots. Kazungu had no immediate neighbors. The closest, according to The New Times, lived about 100 meters away. The house was enclosed by a hedge and private enough that no one saw much of what went on. He lived alone and turned away visitors. A neighbor named Boniface told The New Times that whenever local leaders or the landlord came to the house, Kazungu became agitated and kept them out by saying there was a cobra inside.
Women did come to the house at night, neighbors said, often arriving with him as he came back from the bar. Neighbors took many of them to be sex workers, and The New Times reported that this was one reason people hesitated to step in when they heard violence there.
In the account the prosecution gave at the February 2024 hearing, as reported by The New Times, Kazungu rented the house from April of the previous year until his arrest on September 5, 2023. Read literally, that would mean April 2023. That is hard to square with the disappearance of Eric Turatsinze in March 2022 and with neighbors who said Kazungu had shared the house with a young man when he first moved in. The papers available for this page do not settle when he first moved in.
Eric Turatsinze was born in 1998 and grew up in Kayonza, in Rwanda's Eastern Province. He trained as a hairstylist and finished an internship, then moved to Kigali to look for better work. A relative who lived near Gisimenti, in Remera Sector, gave him a place to stay. His younger sister, Grace Ingabire, lost touch with him in March 2022.
On March 9, 2022, the relative called the family to say Eric was missing. His father and siblings searched for him. They went to relatives' homes. They checked the prisons. They asked at military training camps, in case he had joined the army without telling anyone. They found nothing, and for about a year and a half they heard nothing.
After Kazungu's arrest was in the news, one of Eric's uncles went to RIB with his worry. Investigators showed him Eric's national identity card, which had been found among Kazungu's things. Kazungu had been using it. Prosecutors said in court that he had taken the identity of his only male victim, and AFP reported that he used that name to find the people he targeted. On September 11, 2023, Eric's father gave DNA samples at the Rwanda Forensic Institute. That same day RIB spokesman Thierry Murangira told The New Times that investigations had shown Turatsinze to be one of the victims and that the bureau was waiting for DNA results to identify the body. He was the first victim RIB identified.
His family did not know Kazungu. They asked RIB to let them speak to him so they could find out how he had met Eric, and were told they could do so once more bodies had been identified. On September 12, Grace Ingabire, then 23, posted a photograph of her brother on WhatsApp with the words "Iyo mbimenya nari kugusezera," which means "I would have said goodbye if I had known." The picture showed him in black jeans and a brown shirt over a red turtleneck, making a peace sign from a bike in downtown Kigali. "About 99 per cent of people who knew him can tell you that he is a man who loved to pray," she told The New Times. "Kazungu really robbed us of a good person."
At the first court hearing on September 21, 2023, a woman with a disability affecting her foot cried out at the end of the session: "Oh Jesus, please hold him accountable for my son Eric." The New Times confirmed she was Eric's aunt.
At the appeal hearing in June 2025, a family representative told the High Court that Eric Turatsinze's body had never been recovered. That statement does not match RIB's 2023 description of awaiting DNA results on his body, and no later source fetched for this page explains the difference.
The court convicted Kazungu of murdering 13 people. Most were women. Of those, only a few names have appeared in the press. At the September 21, 2023 hearing, according to KT Press, Kazungu himself named Eliane Mbabazi, a woman called Clementine, a woman called Françoise, and Eric Turatsinze, and said he could not remember the names of some of the others. The New Times listed the same four names in its report on the 2024 verdict. No ages, family details or dates of disappearance for the three women have been published in the sources found for this page.
The prosecution told the remand hearing that Kazungu chose his victims in Remera, Kimironko, Kabuga, Masaka and Rusororo, all neighborhoods in eastern Kigali, and brought them to Busanza. An unnamed RIB source told AFP that he studied the people he targeted and usually picked those unlikely to have close family or friends looking out for them. Murangira said the victims included both men and women, and a police source told AFP that most were sex workers. Seven families were later awarded damages by the court.
Several women escaped from the house in the months before his arrest, and their accounts are much of the reason the case could be pieced together. Two of them testified, according to KT Press, and prosecutors relied on survivors' statements to describe what he did.
One woman, whom The New Times called Akimana, which is not her real name, told the paper in September 2023 that in mid-June she had posted on WhatsApp that she was out of work. A man she did not know called her, said his name was Kazungu, and offered to connect her with a businessman who had a job for her. He would not say where he had found her number. She refused to meet him. He kept calling and messaging for days and on the third day made a video call. Seeing his face put her at ease, and she agreed to meet.
About a week later she took a motorcycle taxi from Remera to Busanza. He bought her drinks at a neighborhood bar while he drank soda. When she asked about the job, he said his boss was at his house nearby, and she went with him. The letter a detective later wrote for her, which she showed to the paper, records that she arrived at the house on June 27, 2023.
Inside, she said, he slapped her, took her Samsung phone, identity card, passport, bag, Rwf10,000 in cash and her house key, raped her and choked her. He tied her to a chair with electric cable and made her give him the passwords for her phone and her Equity Bank account, which held about Rwf130,000. He went through her contacts asking which women she knew who had money. In the morning he told her she would be released only if she paid him Rwf2 million, which she did not have, and he made her call her landlord so he could send someone to collect her belongings. She heard him phone several people asking for help with a task; she said each refused, one of them angrily saying he would never again be involved in Kazungu's schemes, until a fifth man agreed to collect goods from Remera for Rwf100,000. While Kazungu was distracted she worked the cables loose. When the man arrived and Kazungu went outside to pay the motorcycle driver, she ran, naked, on the afternoon of June 28.
She ran first into a house where young children were alone, then on to a house where a pregnant woman took her in. Local leaders came and questioned her. They phoned Kazungu, who said she was a friend and that he had been looking for her. Asked why she had been tied up, he said, according to her account, that it was because she had refused to give him what he wanted. The local leaders gave her a letter to take to the RIB station in Kanombe. A detective there wrote to Kanombe Military Hospital asking for her to be examined. The letter recorded that she had been strangled, tied with cables and injured on her neck and cheeks.
Irene Mukasine, one of the neighbors closest to the house, told The New Times that she and other neighbors helped three women get away from Kazungu. About two months before his arrest, she said, a young woman ran naked into her house one afternoon, her hands and feet marked from restraints she had broken, shouting for Mukasine to hide her because she was going to be killed. Mukasine went outside and saw Kazungu following; when he saw the neighbors, he turned toward the main road. Not long after, another woman who had spent the night at the house broke free and ran to the neighbors. She said he had robbed her that morning by holding a pen to her throat and demanding her mobile money PIN, and her face was bruised. It is not clear from the reporting whether either of these women was Akimana.
The third escape, Mukasine said, was about two weeks before the arrest. The woman could not get out, so she screamed. Neighbors ran to the house and called on Kazungu to open the door. He came out singing a Swahili gospel song and would not let them in. When they began throwing stones onto his roof, he let the woman go, and she ran out through the back door.
After the first two escapes, Mukasine said, neighbors reported what they had seen to the "Mutwarasibo," the lowest-level local leader, responsible for a group of households. He told them it was just an argument between Kazungu and a sex worker. After the third, they went to the police, who asked for a statement from local authorities about the threat Kazungu posed. The Mutwarasibo was reluctant to write it. "In fact, at some point, they told us to stop complaining about him," Mukasine said. The New Times tried to interview the Mutwarasibo; he declined.
Kazungu had in fact been arrested in July 2023. Murangira told The New Times that the arrest was on charges of theft, rape, robbery and the use of threats, and that he was granted bail because there was not enough evidence. Emmanuel Nizeyimana, the executive secretary of Busanza Cell, said Kazungu had been held over robbing young women of money and phones and that he was suspected of bringing them home and raping them. "But no one suspected he had committed murder," the paper reported.
Murangira said investigators kept working on the case after his release. RIB has not published a detailed account of what led to the second arrest.
The New Times later reported, in its coverage of the trial and the appeal, that the case came to light when authorities went to the house over a rent dispute between Kazungu and his landlord. His defense said at the appeal that it was Kazungu himself who disclosed the killings while investigators were questioning him about a separate offense. Murangira's account in September 2023 was that investigators continued their inquiries until Kazungu was rearrested and his home searched, and that they then found the pit he had dug in his kitchen, where he buried those he killed.
The pit was in an outdoor kitchen behind the house. RIB said that the arrest was made with local law enforcement and security organs and thanked residents for providing information. Kazungu was held at the RIB station in Kicukiro. Several houses at the scene were demolished so the bodies could be exhumed. Forensic teams were sent in to establish how many people had died and who they were. Murangira asked anyone with information to come to the Kicukiro station or call RIB's toll-free line, 116.
The count changed several times. Early press reports in Rwanda spoke of up to ten and then more than ten bodies, and neighbors said they believed he had killed 12 young women. An unnamed RIB source told AFP the number was 14. Murangira would not give a figure: "The final number will be determined by forensic investigations," he told AFP. Some bodies were badly decomposed, and he said RIB had to wait for the Rwanda Forensic Institute's results.
At the first court hearing, on September 21, 2023, prosecutors said Kazungu had told interrogators he killed 14 people and had disposed of the remains of two of them, which is why only 12 bodies were exhumed. They did not say what he did with those two. AFP, reporting the sentence in 2024, said he had dissolved two victims and that their remains had not been found. The charges in court were brought over 14 deaths, according to KT Press, 13 of them women. The final conviction, as reported by The New Times in 2024 and 2025, was for 13 murders. None of the sources fetched for this page explain the drop from 14 to 13.
According to RIB, Kazungu confessed during interrogation. He said he always found his victims in bars and persuaded them to come home with him, where he raped them, robbed them and killed them. Murangira described him luring victims, mostly sex workers, robbing them of their phones and belongings, strangling them and burying them in the kitchen.
Prosecutors said he tied his victims' arms and legs and threatened them with hammers and knives. He forced them to send him money from mobile phones and bank accounts and, in some cases, to transfer property including land. Drawing on survivors' testimony, prosecutors said he tortured people by beating them with blunt objects, forcing a pen into their nostrils and strangling them with his hands.
There had been reports that he had accomplices or was involved in organ trafficking. On September 11, 2023, Murangira said the preliminary investigation had ruled both out. "He was acting alone, a fact supported by both Kazungu's statement and that of victims who managed to escape his residence after being robbed," he said. Investigators had also examined his mobile money transactions and found nothing linking him to a criminal network. Some neighbors had doubted that one man could dig a pit so deep; RIB's finding was that he did.
The NPPA received the case file on September 11, 2023, and filed it with the Primary Court of Kicukiro on September 18.
Before the hearing, Kicukiro District officials said residents wanted Kazungu tried in front of the community in Gashikiri village, as another murder suspect had been tried in Kanombe Sector. "What we request as citizens is that he be brought before the citizens so that they question and accuse him in line with what they saw," resident Boniface Twahirwa said. That did not happen; the case went to the ordinary courts.
Kazungu appeared at Kicukiro Primary Court on the morning of Thursday, September 21, 2023, for a hearing on whether he should be held in pretrial detention. Crowds and journalists filled the court grounds, and some people had to wait outside the fence. He arrived in an RIB vehicle with two locked doors, wearing handcuffs, a black T-shirt and brown trousers, escorted by four armed officers. He was smiling as he came in, The New Times reported. He had no lawyer.
When the hearing opened, he asked the judges to exclude journalists, saying his crimes were serious and he did not want people to learn from them. Prosecutors called the request baseless, and the court refused it, noting that he would not be asked at that stage to describe how he killed anyone.
Prosecutors read out ten counts, including murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, robbery, damage to another person's house, forgery, fraud, unauthorized access to computer data and the desecration and concealment of human corpses. When the judge asked for his defense, Kazungu said that what the prosecution said was true and he had nothing to add. Pressed on why, he said, "Those to whom I committed these infected me with HIV wilfully." He said he had killed the women in revenge. The killing of the man, he said, was to take his identity documents.
The hearing lasted about 40 minutes. On September 26, 2023, the court ordered him held in custody, the judge noting that he had pleaded guilty to serious crimes.
The case moved to the Intermediate Court of Nyarugenge in Kigali. At the hearing on Friday, February 9, 2024, the prosecution laid out the case, including photographs of the tools used to torture victims and the testimony of survivors, and asked for convictions on all charges, life imprisonment and a fine of Rwf10 million. Kazungu again pleaded guilty to all counts. He told the court he had committed the crimes alone, that he had done them brutally and that he could not explain what he had been trying to achieve. He said he was not poor enough to be described as someone struggling to survive. He asked for forgiveness and for a lighter sentence because he had given investigators information they needed.
The verdict was read on March 7, 2024, according to The New Times; KT Press and AFP reported the sentence on Friday, March 8. The court found him guilty on all ten counts. AFP's report listed murder, rape, forgery, impersonation and desecration of human corpses among them. The presiding judge cited his full admission and the evidence presented and found no mitigating factors that would justify less than the maximum. "He is sentenced to life in prison," the judge said, according to AFP; the reading took only a few minutes, and Kazungu was not in the courtroom. The court imposed the Rwf10 million fine and ordered him to pay damages to the families of his victims, seven of whom were later reported as receiving them. Life imprisonment is the heaviest sentence under Rwandan law, and The New Times cited Article 107 of the penal code as the provision for murder. Some relatives of the victims were in court to hear the result.
Kazungu appealed against the sentence, not the conviction. His defense said the appeal was filed on April 4, 2024. The High Court in Kigali heard it on Thursday, June 12, 2025. The prosecution argued it had been filed too late; the court was asked to decide that question together with the merits.
His lawyer, Faustin Murangwa, argued that Kazungu was a first-time offender who had confessed from the start, at his bail hearing and throughout, and had helped uncover the full extent of the crimes. "He deserves a second chance to be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society," Murangwa said. He pointed to the creche for orphans in Remera and to the 2018 business loss.
Kazungu spoke for himself. "I was not forced to speak. I gave the information willingly," he said, adding that while in prison he had remembered and reported one more missing person. "What I did was cowardice, not manliness. I apologise to the Head of State, the government, parents, and children. If I could go back, I would not choose that path." He said he wanted to return to society.
Prosecutors said the killings were premeditated and carried out with unusual cruelty. "This was a deliberate pattern. He chose who to kill. He concealed bodies," one said. "Even if he confessed, that cannot outweigh the gravity and scale of his crimes." Victims' relatives came in large numbers. A family representative told the court his confession had been incomplete and had left out details families needed. Another said that to suggest he return to society was dangerous.
On Friday, July 11, 2025, the High Court ruled that the appeal lacked merit and left the Nyarugenge verdict unchanged: life imprisonment, the Rwf10 million fine and damages to seven victims' families.
According to The New Times report of July 11, 2025, the High Court ruling ended Kazungu's appeals and he has no further option to appeal. As of that report he was serving a life sentence; no later source was found for this page. His conviction is final.
His motive. Kazungu told the court in 2023 that he killed women because they had deliberately infected him with HIV. That is his own claim. No source reports any evidence for it, and in 2024 and 2025 he gave other explanations, including the collapse of his business, while also saying he was not driven by poverty.
The number of victims. He confessed to 14 killings, prosecutors said 12 bodies were exhumed, and the court convicted him of 13 murders. At the appeal he said he had reported a further missing person from prison. Whether there were victims at earlier addresses, such as Kimironko, was never reported as established.
What happened to two victims. An unnamed RIB source told AFP in 2023 that he dissolved some victims in acid. Prosecutors in court said only that he had got rid of the evidence of two, without saying how. AFP's 2024 report said he dissolved two victims. RIB did not confirm the method on the record.
Films about serial killers. The same anonymous source told AFP that Kazungu said he learned to kill by watching films about serial killers. This was never confirmed by RIB or presented in the court reports found for this page.
Cannibalism. KT Press reported in September 2023 that he admitted killing 14 people and eating some of them. No other source found for this page, including The New Times reports of the same hearing, mentions it, and it is not part of the charges as reported. It is treated here as unconfirmed.
Accomplices. Neighbors suspected that someone helped dig the pit, and Akimana heard him asking several men for help. RIB said the evidence showed he acted alone in the killings, and no one else was charged in the reporting found.
How he was caught. Different reports credit a landlord-tenant dispute, information from residents, continuing inquiries after his July release, or his own disclosure during questioning about another offense. These accounts may all be partly true; the official sequence has not been published.
2009: By his lawyer's account, Kazungu opens a creche for orphans in Remera, Kigali.
2016: The school closes, by the same account.
2018: He says he lost $120,000 worth of liquor at the Uganda-Kenya border.
March 9, 2022: Eric Turatsinze, 25, is reported missing from a relative's home near Gisimenti, Remera.
June 27-28, 2023: A woman held overnight at Kazungu's house escapes and reports to the RIB station in Kanombe.
July 2023: Kazungu is arrested on suspicion of theft, rape, robbery and use of threats; released on bail for lack of evidence.
About July-August 2023: Neighbors help two more women escape; reports to the local leader and police lead nowhere.
September 5, 2023: RIB arrests Kazungu; bodies are found in a pit in his kitchen in Gashikiri village, Busanza.
September 11, 2023: RIB names Eric Turatsinze as a victim; the case file goes to the NPPA.
September 18, 2023: NPPA files the case at Kicukiro Primary Court.
September 21, 2023: First hearing; Kazungu admits the charges and claims an HIV revenge motive.
September 26, 2023: Court orders him held in pretrial detention.
February 9, 2024: Trial hearing at the Nyarugenge Intermediate Court; prosecution seeks life and a Rwf10 million fine.
March 7-8, 2024: Sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to all 10 counts, including 13 murders.
April 4, 2024: Appeal filed, according to the defense.
June 12, 2025: High Court in Kigali hears the appeal against sentence.
July 11, 2025: High Court rejects the appeal; the life sentence stands. Serving life as of that New Times report.