One of the most wanted fugitives in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, a wealthy businessman accused of supplying machetes to killers and broadcasting propaganda urging mass slaughter, has been arrested outside Paris, officials said on Saturday.
Felicien Kabuga, who had a US$5 million bounty on his head, had been accused of equipping militias in the genocide that killed more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus who tried to protect them.
The 84-year-old Kabuga was arrested as a result of a joint investigation with the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals office of the prosecutor, French authorities said.
Photo: EPA-EFE / INTERPOL
He had been living in a town north of Paris, Asnieres-Sur-Seine, under an assumed name, the prosecutor’s office said.
The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted Kabuga in 1997 on charges related to conspiracy to commit genocide, persecution and extermination.
Rwandan prosecutors have said financial documents found in the capital, Kigali, after the genocide indicated that Kabuga used dozens of his companies to import vast quantities of machetes that were used to slaughter people.
He also was accused of establishing the station Radio Television Mille Collines that broadcast vicious propaganda against the ethnic Tutsi, as well as training and equipping the Interahamwe militia that led the killing spree.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed Kabuga’s arrest, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
It “sends a powerful message that those who are alleged to have committed such crimes cannot evade justice and will eventually be held accountable, even more than a quarter of a century later,” Dujarric said.
Kabuga is expected to be transferred to the custody of the UN mechanism based at The Hague, Netherlands, where he is to stand trial.
“The arrest of Kabuga today is a reminder that those responsible for genocide can be brought to account, even 26 years after their crimes,” the mechanism’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said in a statement.
He said law enforcement agencies and prosecution services from Rwanda, Belgium, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the US contributed to the arrest.
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