France's top antiterrorism judge recommended on Monday that Rwandan President Paul Kagame be tried for war crimes for his alleged involvement in the downing of his predecessor's plane, an act which sparked the 1994 genocide.
The judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, said Kagame should face prosecution before the international war crimes court in Tanzania because he is suspected of involvement in the death of then Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania is currently hearing the case of several former high-ranking Rwandan army officers accused of genocide during the 100 days of carnage that followed.
The court last month rejected a request to take into account an earlier account from Bruguiere into the killing of Habyarimana which reportedly named Kagame as the main decision-maker behind the April 6, 1994 attack in which Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed.
Habyarimana's aircraft was shot down and his death sparked off the genocide in which some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were butchered.
Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira and a four-man French crew were also killed in the crash.
Kagame, who headed the Tutsi rebel force that took power in Kigali in July 1994, ending the genocide, has always denied any involvement in the attack on the aircraft carrying Habyarimana.
Those already being tried by the Tanzania-based ICTR have attempted to deflect blame for the genocide onto Habyarimana's killers.
But the court has disagreed, ruling that the charges facing the accused are not based on any alleged responsibility or involvement in Habyarimana's death.
French courts also called on Monday for international arrest warrants to be served against nine of Kagame's aides in relation to the plane attack, including James Kabarebe, a senior officer in the Rwandan army.
Before the allegations of Kagame's involvement, which surfaced in unofficial UN documents, it was widely assumed that Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists in his own entourage, who were opposed to power-sharing arrangements with Kagame's mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
A confidential memorandum written by an investigator for the UN in 1997 and implicating Kagame is under seal at the ICTR, which has refused to give a copy to Bruguiere.
The ICTR chief prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow of Gambia, has said that the attack against Habyarimana is not part of his mandate.
Relations between the French and Rwandan governments have been dominated by mutual distrust in recent years following suspicions that France gave critical backing to Habyarimana.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS