Rwanda genocide: Kagame 'cleared of Habyarimana crash'

Around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda in 1994

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Rwanda: Haunted Nation

• Slow pace of justice
• Kagame: Visionary or tyrant?
• Paul Kagame's hold on Rwandans
• Children of rape

A report has appeared to clear Rwanda's President Paul Kagame of orchestrating the 1994 assassination of the country's then-leader Juvenal Habyarimana.

The team - mandated by a French inquiry - visited the scene of the attack to work out the trajectory of the missile which shot down his plane.

The crash was one of the triggers that sparked the genocide.

An earlier French probe blamed Mr Kagame and his allies, but they say Hutu extremists killed Habyarimana.

Rwanda's government has welcomed the conclusions of this new report.

The plane crash on 6 April 1994 - in which Habyarimana and Burundi's leader died - triggered the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in just 100 days.

The killings came to an end when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) rebel movement, headed by Mr Kagame, captured Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

Elite presidential troops

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Analysis

Hugh SchofieldBBC News, Paris

This is an important development in the row over the Habyarimana assassination, because it removes much of the force from the theory that he was killed by President Paul Kagame's then RPF rebels. The emergence of this theory - and then the support it received from France's leading anti-terrorist judge - caused a total diplomatic breakdown between Paris and Kigali.

In the Rwandan capital, it was widely believed that the judge was under government instructions to implicate Mr Kagame's men in order to deflect attention from France's own alleged guilt in the 1994 massacres. There is no evidence of that. But it is true that claims about RPF involvement were based mainly on the evidence of defectors, which could not be seen as reliable.

The new technical report - ordered by a new judge - appears to be based on much more solid evidence. The experts say the missile that downed President Habyarimana's jet must have come from his own army camp. In other words, it must have been fired by Hutu extremists. That is exactly the version that President Kagame has always upheld.

If the report ends up exculpating the associates of Mr Kagame named in the investigation, there will be much relief in Kigali. Probably in the French foreign ministry too.

Correspondents say the court on Tuesday concluded that the missile was shot from a distance of up to 1km (more than half a mile) away from the plane, which was about to land at Kigali airport.

At the time this area was held by the Rwandan army - a unit of elite presidential troops.

The experts say it would be very difficult for forces loyal to Mr Kagame to be in this area and therefore shoot down the plane.

They concluded that it would have been much easier for Habyarimana's troops or French troops who were in the area to launch the missile.

In 2006, a French judge accused Mr Kagame and his allies of killing Habyarimana - an allegation he dismissed as "ridiculous" and which prompted him to break off relations with Paris for three years.

Five years later, in 2011, a former senior ally of the president Theogene Rudasingwa - the RPF's secretary general and a major at the time of the genocide - also accused Mr Kagame. Mr Rudasingwa fell out with the president and now lives in exile in the US.

Mr Kagame has always insisted that Hutus hardliners - who considered Habyarimana too moderate - shot down the plane and blamed the RPF to provide a pretext for carrying out the premeditated slaughter.

Critics of the 2006 investigation said it failed to visit the area of the attack, or interview the nine high-ranking RPF officers it accused of involvement. It said the missile was shot from a distance of four kilometres away from the airport.

French judge Marc Trevidic headed this latest French inquiry, launched - with the full co-operation of the Rwandan authorities - towards the end of 2010 because the French crew of the plane also died.

The team has interviewed six of those accused in the 2006 report and conducted a forensic investigation. Two missiles specialists, two air accident experts, a pilot, two surveyors and a sound expert have reconstructed the sequence of the attack.

'Unhappy'

Following this report, Judge Trevidic can either drop the affair or continue his investigations, which could result in a court case.

"Today's findings constitute vindication for Rwanda's long-held position on the circumstances surrounding events of April 1994," Rwanda's Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said in a statement.

The lawyer for the Habyarimana family said they are unhappy about the report's conclusions - questioning the credibility of the experts - and they still want someone to be found guilty.

"It does not matter where the shooting took place," Habyarimana's son Jean-Luc told the BBC's Great Lakes service.

"What matters is who fired the missile," he said

Habyarimana's widow, Agathe, told the BBC that she wanted the French inquiry to find out who had bought the allegedly Russian missile that hit the plane - because that would help to identify those behind the attack.

Rwanda has historically been beset by ethnic tension. It worsened under Belgian colonel rule when the Tutsi minority enjoyed better jobs and better education than the Hutu majority.

At independence, following inter-ethnic violence, many thousands of Tutsis went into exile in Uganda from where they eventually launched a civil war in 1990.

A 1993 peace agreement was supposed to usher in a power-sharing government - but it did little to stop the unrest.