AP News, October 12th, 2007
Rwanda said Friday it has opened an inquiry into the mysterious shooting down of a plane carrying its president 13 years ago, which led to extremist Hutus taking power and starting the 1994 genocide.
The government decided to set up an inquiry because it has no confidence in a French magistrate's investigation into the April 6, 1994, attack on President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane, said Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama.
French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued arrest warrants last year for nine Rwandans suspected of plotting the downing of Habyarimana's plane, a decision that prompted Rwanda to break diplomatic links with France. France is investigating because the plane's crew was French.
"Rwanda has always asked the international community to investigate this crash but nothing has been done. ... We feel that the world needs to know what happened," Karugarama told The Associated Press.
A U.N. tribunal that is trying the masterminds of the genocide has determined that the plane crash did not spark the massacres of more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 and is therefore not investigating it.
Supreme Court judge Jean Mutsinzi will head the seven-member panel that will conduct the inquiry, Karugarama said. It has a year to report on its findings.
The 100-day slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus was unleashed by the extremist government that took power after Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down as he returned home from peace talks with Tutsi-led rebels in Tanzania.
Bruguiere suspects that nine Rwandans close to Rwanda's current president, Paul Kagame, were responsible for plotting the assassination or actually shooting down the plane.
Bruguiere is renowned for tracking down the convicted terrorist Ilich Sanchez Ramirez, also known as Carlos the Jackal. The families of the French pilot, co-pilot and mechanic, who all died in the crash, filed a suit in France in 1998.
After the attack, militants from the Hutu ethnic majority, known as Interahamwe, set up roadblocks across the capital, Kigali, and on April 7 began killing Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front toppled the Hutu extremists and ended the genocide.
