Probe ends in Rwandan leader's crash
PARIS -- A French investigation concludes that Rwandan President Paul Kagame was behind the fatal 1994 downing of a plane carrying his predecessor, an event that set off the Rwandan genocide, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The French daily Le Monde said the investigation into President Juvenal Habyarimana's death also implicates 10 other prominent members of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front, the former Tutsi rebel movement that has been in power since July 1994.
The French newspaper said the findings are contained in a 220-page report dated Jan. 30 but not yet turned over to the Paris prosecutor's office.
Rwandan Information Minister Laurent Nkusi dismissed the report as unsubstantiated and suggested it was politically motivated. France had close ties with the Habyarimana regime.
"They don't have any element proving beyond doubt that what they say is true," Nkusi told The Associated Press.
"The timing at the beginning of the commemoration is badly chosen," he said, referring to upcoming ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide. "The report basically says this regime in Kigali is responsible for the genocide. That is a paradox. We know the RPF has saved many survivors."
The report concludes France's six-year-long investigation into the April 6, 1994, attack that killed Habyarimana and unleashed the slaughter of more than 500,000 Rwandans.
Those killed were mainly minority Tutsis and politically moderate members of the Hutu majority. The 100-day slaughter ended when rebels led by Kagame overthrew the extremist government in July 1994.
Hutu extremists in the army and government at the time have long been thought responsible for killing Habyarimana -- also a Hutu -- in a bid to sabotage his efforts to implement a power-sharing deal with the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF.
However, the report, as quoted by Le Monde, designates Kagame -- then a major general -- as the chief decision-maker in the attack, heading a list of 10 other RPF officers and two others who operated the two ground-to-air missiles used in the attack.
The French investigation began at the behest of families of the French crew killed in the attack.
It was based on the testimony from hundreds of people, including a member of the "commando network" allegedly under the command of Kagame and charged with carrying out the attack, according to Le Monde.
The French report also alleges that the United Nations was obstructing the investigation into the airplane attack. It obtained the black box of the downed Falcon 50 aircraft and transferred it to its New York headquarters in 1994 without ever investigating, according to Le Monde.
In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was surprised by the report and has asked his staff to check into it.
"It is our policy always to cooperate with criminal investigations, particularly in a situation where we have had a very keen interest in it," Annan said. "So I really do not understand the basis for the observations which I read in the papers."
The Tanzania-based U.N. tribunal investigating the genocide has said the airplane's downing did not fall under the court's mandate of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
