France closes investigation into plane attack that sparked Rwandan genocide
France’s Supreme Court confirmed on Tuesday that an investigation into the downing of a presidential airliner that caused the 1994 genocide in Rwanda should be closed, ending a two-decade legal saga.
The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal of the families of those killed in the missile attack on President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994.
They asked the judges to reverse a lower court’s decision to drop the case against people close to current President Paul Kagame.
Relations between Paris and Kigali have long been strained due to the investigation and associated arrest warrants.
The Court of Cassation concluded that “the investigation was complete and there were insufficient charges against anyone for the alleged crimes, nor any other offence”.
“Of course this decision disappoints the Rwandan prosecutors, but in reality the damage was done long ago,” said Philip Melak, attorney for Agathe, Habyarimana’s widow.
Defense attorneys Leon Leif Forster and Bernard Mengin called the decision “a clear legal victory for Rwandan soldiers unjustly accused” by a French judge in 2006, claiming that the investigation “had a distinctly political whirl” about it.
“The defense hopes that the battle on the legal front will also help bring justice to the 1 million victims of the genocide against the Tutsi,” they added.
A Falcon 50 was carrying Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira from a summit in Tanzania, where they were discussing the crisis in the two countries and continuing negotiations with Kagame, then the leader of the Tutsi rebel group in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).
Its overthrow is widely seen as the spark that ignited a genocide in which more than 800,000 people are believed to have died – mostly from the minority Tutsi at the hands of the Hutus.
Rwanda’s representative to the United Nations said at the time that the plane was shot down by “enemies of peace,” while the Defense Ministry said “unidentified elements” were responsible.
Relatives of the French flight crew turned to the courts in 1998.
French investigators have long suspected that Kagame’s rebels shot the plane as it was landing in the Rwandan capital.
Later, they pursued the theory that Hutu extremists dissatisfied with the moderate Habyarimana were behind the attack, and were unsuccessful in doing so.
But a French expert report in 2012 found that the plane was hit by missiles fired from a camp occupied by Habyarimana’s presidential guard.
Investigating judges defended their dismissal of the case in December 2018, saying there was a “lack of indisputable physical evidence”, leaving the charges based on witness accounts that were “often contradictory or impossible to verify”.
They also stressed the “harmful atmosphere” that surrounded the case, including murders, disappearances of witnesses, and tampering with testimony.
(AFP)
