Killer’s death spurs hunt for others
The hunt for more than 250 people suspected of taking part in the Rwandan genocide has been bolstered by the unearthing of the remains of one of the atrocity’s masterminds, days after another was captured in Paris.
Confirmation of the death of Augustin Bizimana, who was charged with 13 offences, including genocide, rape and murder, and last week’s arrest of Felicien Kabuga, ended a frustrating hiatus in tracking down the fugitives of the 1994 massacre.
The chief prosecutor tasked with bringing the suspected genocidaires to justice warned those accused of taking part in the slaughter of up to a million Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus to be on their guard. ‘‘We have interesting leads,’’ Serge Brammertz said.
Bizimana, who died in the Republic of the Congo
20 years ago, was responsible for the murders of Agathe Uwilingiyimana, Rwanda’s former prime minister, 10 Belgian peacekeepers and many Tutsis, the prosecutor said.
Surveillance operations against Kabuga’s 11 children in Britain, France and Belgium led to his discovery in Asnieres-sur-Seine, a smart inner suburb of Paris.
Eric Emeraux, head of the Central Office for Combating Crimes Against Humanity, said officers took advantage of the lockdown to track relatives. Kabuga, now 84 and in a wheelchair, offered no resistance when officers went to his door last Saturday.
Rwandan activists in France claim that the authorities have been reluctant to pursue up to 30 genocide suspects thought to live there, along with senior figures from the government of President Juve´nal Habyarimana, whose assassination led to the killings.
One of the most wanted is Agathe Kanziga, Habyarimana’s widow. France has refused her request for political exile but turned down Rwanda’s warrant for extradition. She is living comfortably just outside Paris while French investigating judges have been conducting their own long inquiry into a criminal complaint against her by Rwandan exile groups.
These activists assume that Kabuga enjoyed some level of protection from the French state and they believe that President
Emmanuel Macron’s more positive attitude than his predecessors in accepting France’s past role in Rwanda had led to his arrest.
Kabuga is thought to have lived in Asnieres for three or four years.
‘‘He was our Klaus Barbie, our Eichmann,’’ Etienne Nsanzimana, head of a genocide survivors group in France, said.
Once one of Rwanda’s richest men, Kabuga stands accused of bankrolling the 100 days of slaughter – including by importing hundreds of thousands of machetes to arm the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia responsible for many of the killings.
Radio Mille Collines, the station he partly owned, urged neighbours to turn on their ‘‘cockroach’’ Tutsi minority neighbours.
Albert Gasake was 10 when the killing began near his home in south Rwanda and recalled feeling ‘‘hunted like a wild animal’’.
He and his family – including his mother, cousin and four sisters – had sought refuge at the town hall in Muyira.
‘‘Only my older sister and I survived that day,’’ he said. They had been left for dead under bodies.
Gasake, 36, now a lawyer living in America, said Kabuga’s arrest left him with a sense of ‘‘too little too late’’.
According to French police, the fugitive had 28 aliases. Attempts to seize him when he was in Nairobi in 1997, 2003 and 2008 coincided with the murder of informants.
‘‘It’s inconceivable he could have stayed undetected without the help of someone high up in the government,’’ Gasake said.
The Times