Kagame, accomplice in Habyarimana’s assassination, says French Judge              APA-Dakar (Senegal) The French Judge Jean Louis Bruguiere has accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame of "abetting" in the assassination of his predecessor the late President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994, and summoned the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to order legal proceedings against him.
  Kagame, a former rebel leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFP), cannot be apprehended because of the immunity he enjoys as a sitting heads of state.
  Experts said French courts cannot, in such ambit, back the request of Judge Bruguiere who just ended his investigation on the 6 April 1994 assassination of former President Habyarimana.
  Rwandan political observers however agreed this assassination sparked off and fuelled the bloody genocide that killed 800,000 people in less than three months.
  In his investigation, the French judge blames Kagame for a part of the tragedy, which the Rwandan authorities have immediately rejected by starting up an investigation in Kigali to set the responsibility of the 1994 tragic events on the French army.
  President Kagame who categorically denied the allegations and referred to them as "unfounded" said they were signs of France’s unjustified fury over the present Rwandan authorities.
  In a document submitted to the Paris public prosecutor’s office, judge Bruguiere cited the names of nine close aides of President Kagame among them, the Rwandan armed forces chief of staff, James Kabarebe ; the present Rwandan ambassador to India, Faustin Nyamwasa-Kayumba ; Charles Kayonga of the Rwandan army and many other Rwandan soldiers and senior civil servants.
  The public prosecutor’s office has requested the issuing of an international warrant against the nine people and it calls on Judge Bruguiere to sign the request in the coming days.
  The judge confirmed that "Paul Kagame and members of his rebel staff had, after the August 1993 Arusha agreement, conceived the assassination which he planned."
  Judge Bruguiere, who intends to notify the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the elements of his investigation for a possible submission to the ICTR, has already finished his work which apparently attributes the responsibility of the "assassination and part of the genocide which followed" to President Kagame.
  It can be recalled that during the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004, President Kagame accused France of being "an accomplice to the genocide."

         MN/dng/ad/daj/tjm/APA     2006-11-21                      African Press Agency 2006 Copyright - Free items u

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