3.30pm (Rwanda), 2.30pm (UK): David Cameron's two-day visit to Rwanda just took on sombre note. The Conservative leader spent more than an hour in the Kigali Memorial Centre, marking the 1994 genocide in which at least 800,000 people died.
David Cameron stands by the open
graves of victims of genocide with guide
Emmanuel Gasana after laying a wreath
at the National Memorial for Genocide in
Kigali.
Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA Wire.
He looked understandably grim-faced throughout and at the end wrote in the visitors book: "There are no words to describe what you have shown. We must learn and never, ever forget."
Mr Cameron was taken into a dark circular room, which showed four cases crammed with skulls and two similar cases of femurs.
He heard about the several villains and some of the heroes of the genocide, including Sula Karuhimbi, a woman aged 70 who saved 17 lives.
At one point he stopped for a while by a display memorialising some of the children killed by the Interahamwe. They included a two-year-old boy, Organ Hubert Kirenga, whose last memory was seeing his mother die before he was shot dead.
A civil war begun in 1990 by rebels from Rwanda's Tutsi ethnic minority culminated in the genocide of roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in April 1994 and the overthrow of the majority Hutu regime later the same year.
Occasions like this make the two-day visit seem less of a stunt and more of a necessary rite of passage for any aspiring British leader.
