The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has freed the first of its convicted prisoners from its detention center in Arusha of northern Tanzania, according to reports reaching here on Thursday.

The freed prisoner, 81-year-old Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, has served his prison terms in the detention center of the United Nations court after the former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor was convicted of luring Tutsis into a Rwandan church for slaughter during the 1994 genocide.

The Arusha-based UN court in February 2003 sentenced Elizaphan Ntakirutimana to 10 years of imprisonment for aiding and abetting genocide. He was detained in the center long before his conviction.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was the president of the west Rwanda Seventh-Day Adventist area at the time of the genocide.

The ICTR has up till this day convicted 26 people and acquitted five since its first trial in 1996.

Some 800,000 people were allegedly killed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the United Nations General Assembly moved to set up a special tribunal to try those genocide suspects.

The pastor's son, Gerard Ntakirutimana, was also found guilty of genocide and was sentenced to 25 years in jail by the UN court in that 2003 trial that was described as one of the fastest trials in the ICTR history.

Source: Xinhua