The International Criminal Court (ICC) has terminated proceedings against former rebel commander Sylvestre Mudacumura and withdrawn the arrest warrant issued against him, the court announced, because there is no indication that he is still alive.

Pre-Trial Chamber I took the decision on Wednesday, 12 November 2026, granting a request from the Office of the Prosecutor to withdraw the warrant and bring the case to an end. Taarifa, a Rwandan news outlet, reported the decision on Friday, 13 November 2026.

"There is no indication that Mr Mudacumura is still alive," the court said, according to Taarifa. The court added that around 17 September 2019, Mudacumura was killed in an operation by the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC).

Court cannot try a dead person

The ICC explained that its jurisdiction cannot be exercised over a deceased person. Once the court accepted the notification of his death, there was no legal basis to keep the proceedings open. "Accordingly, any outstanding requests for cooperation related to these proceedings are no longer in effect," the court said.

The decision is not an acquittal and does not clear Mudacumura of the allegations against him. It means only that the case cannot proceed to trial because the accused is dead, so the charges against him will never be tested in court.

A second report, by the Spanish outlet Demócrata, said the court reached its conclusion after examining documentation from the court's Registry and the Office of the Prosecutor about his death, including open-source reports and public statements, and found no evidence that he was still alive.

Nine counts of war crimes

Mudacumura was the former Supreme Commander of the Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan rebel group based in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for him on 13 July 2012, on nine counts of war crimes.

The alleged crimes were committed between 20 January 2009 and the end of September 2010, during fighting in North Kivu and South Kivu provinces in the east of the country. The charges listed attacks against civilians, murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, rape, torture, destruction of property, pillaging and outrages upon personal dignity.

For more than a decade, Mudacumura was one of the ICC's most wanted suspects in the Congo cases, but he was never arrested or brought to The Hague. The Congolese army announced in September 2019 that its forces had killed him, along with his closest lieutenants, in an operation the previous night. That announcement was widely reported at the time, but the ICC case remained formally open until this week's decision.

A case closed without a trial

The FDLR emerged in 2000, made up of Hutu refugees and Rwandan militiamen who had fled after their involvement in the 1994 genocide, and settled in Congolese territory, according to Demócrata. The group has been active in eastern Congo for more than two decades, and its forces have been accused of repeated attacks on civilians.

With the warrant withdrawn, the Mudacumura case is now closed. It ends more than 14 years after the warrant was issued and more than seven years after his reported death, without the man at the centre of it ever facing a judge. For the victims of the alleged crimes in the Kivus, the decision means there will be no trial of the commander accused of ordering them.