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Rwanda starts probe on 1994 presidential crash

Rwanda has set up an inquiry into the mysterious shooting down of a plane carrying the nation's president 13 years ago, after which extremist Hutus took power and started the 1994 genocide, the justice minister said.

Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama said on Friday that the government opened the inquiry because it had no confidence in a French magistrate's investigation into the April 6, 1994, downing of then-president Juvenal Habyarimana's plane by unidentified attackers.

French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere last November issued arrest warrants for nine ranking Rwandans suspected of plotting the downing of Habyarimana's plane, a decision that prompted Rwanda to break off diplomatic links with France.

France is investigating the case because the plane's crew was French.

"Rwanda has always asked the international community to investigate this crash but nothing has been done ... We feel that the world needs to know what happened," Karugarama said.

A UN tribunal that is trying the masterminds of the genocide has determined that the plane crash did not spark the massacres of more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 and is therefore not investigating it.

Supreme Court judge Jean Mutsinzi will head the seven-member panel that will conduct the inquiry, Karugarama said. It has a year to report back to the government on its findings.

The slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus was unleashed by the extremist government that took power after Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down as he returned home from peace talks with Tutsi-led rebels in Tanzania.

Bruguiere suspects that nine Rwandans close to the current president, Paul Kagame, were responsible for plotting the assassination or actually shooting down Habyarimana's plane.

Bruguiere is renowned for tracking down convicted terrorist Carlos the Jackal. The families of the French pilot, co-pilot and mechanic, who all died in the crash, filed a suit in France in 1998.

After the attack, militants from the Hutu ethnic majority, known as Interahamwe, quickly set up roadblocks across the capital, Kigali, and on April 7 began killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front toppled the Hutu extremists and ended the genocide.
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