A French supreme court on Wednesday approved transfer of Rwanda genocide suspect Félicien Kabuga to UN tribunal based in Arusha, a city in Northern Tanzania, a judicial source confirmed Wednesday to APA in Kigali.
Kabuga is renowned as the financier of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which claimed a million innocent lives in a period of three months.
The statement issued by France’s Cour de Cassation said it “considers that the investigating chamber was able to consider correctly that there was no legal or medical obstacle to the execution of the arrest warrant transfer order to the United Nations detention centre in Arusha, Tanzania.”
In their submission, his lawyers argued that Kabuga’s health was too frail for him to be transferred to Tanzania, particularly during a dangerous pandemic.
They also argued that French law violated the constitution by failing to provide for a thorough examination of international arrest warrants.
Félicien Kabuga, aged 84, accused of being one of the main financiers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was arrested last month in Asnières-sur-Seine in the Paris suburbs. One of Rwanda’s wealthiest businessmen at the time of the genocide of the Tutsis, he was often called the “genocide financier” for having financed and equipped the Interahamwe militias that carried out most of the massacres during the genocide. He also created Radio Mille Collines (Thousand Hills Radio), which broadcast Hutu-extremist ideology, including calls for murder during the genocide.
The last time Kabuga had been found with certainty, though he escaped police, was in 2007 in Frankfurt, where he was traveling on a Tanzanian passport.
He was with Augustin Ngirabatware, the former Rwandan minister of economic planning during the genocide, who is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda, and who was arrested by German police. According to French investigators, Kabuga used 28 false identities while in hiding.
This gives some idea of the networks of assistance that organizers of the Rwandan genocide have across Africa and Europe, it said.
CU/abj/APA