NEW YORK (Oct. 6, 2026) — This week, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) submitted a communication to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on behalf of Cassien Ntamuhanga, a Rwandan journalist and dissident who has not been seen since he was seized in Mozambique more than five years ago.
On May 23, 2021, uniformed agents took Ntamuhanga from his home on Inhaca Island. Moments before his disappearance, he sent a final text message: “Now my life is in danger. I am sending SOS to the God-fearing nations of the earth!” Witnesses saw him handcuffed, with his legs chained, as he was taken off the island by boat.
Mozambican authorities have denied holding him, and there is no indication that an arrest warrant was ever produced. Media reported that he was handed over to the Rwandan Embassy in Maputo on June 1, 2021. The Rwandan government has never accounted for his whereabouts.
Cassien’s last message was a plea for help. Nobody answered it. More than five years later, his family still has no answers. We are asking the UN to press Rwanda and Mozambique to account for what happened to him,” HRF legal and research officer Hannah Van Dijcke said.
Ntamuhanga, a longtime critic of Paul Kagame’s regime, is the former director of Amazing Grace, a radio station in Kigali, and a co-founder of the Rwandan Alliance for the National Pact-Abaryankuna, an opposition movement of young Rwandans advocating for reconciliation among all of the country’s communities. Together with writer Gérard Niyomugabo and singer Kizito Mihigo, he publicly called for all victims of Rwanda’s violence to be remembered, challenging the official narrative of the ruling party.
In April 2014, all three were arrested within days of each other. Niyomugabo has not been seen since, and Mihigo later died in police custody. After a trial criticized by human rights groups as unfair, Ntamuhanga was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “conspiracy against the Established Government or the President,” among other charges. He escaped prison in 2017 and fled to Mozambique, where he registered as an asylum seeker and continued to speak out against the Rwandan regime. Seventeen days before his disappearance, a Rwandan court sentenced him in absentia to another 25 years in prison.
Ntamuhanga’s family has also faced reprisals for his activism. In 2016, three of his brothers disappeared and have not been seen since. After his escape, a cousin was found dead, another brother was detained, and an uncle was imprisoned for “helping a fugitive.”
His case fits a well-documented pattern of transnational repression by the Rwandan regime under Paul Kagame, which has targeted critics abroad through surveillance, kidnappings, and killings.
HRF urges the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to press the governments of Mozambique and Rwanda to disclose Ntamuhanga’s fate and whereabouts.
