France reopens probe into 1994 assassination of Rwandan president to pursue claims current leader Paul Kagame was directly responsible

French investigators have reopened their probe into the 1994 genocide-triggering assassination of a Rwandan president to question a dissident general who has accused the country’s current head of state of orchestrating the killing.

After a French-crewed plane carrying Juvenual Habyarimana was shot down with a missile on April 6, 1994, a campaign targeting Rwanda’s Tutsi population was unleashed. Within 100 days, some 800,000 people had been slaughtered.

The Rwandan former (1994-2002) army chief of staff whom French investigating magistrates want to question, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, lives in exile in South Africa, where he has survived at least two attempts on his life. He is the subject of a previous French arrest warrant and has also been sentenced to 24 years in jail by a Rwandan court.

Like President Paul Kagame, he was a founder member of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which took power in the central African country in late 1994, putting an end to the genocide.

In a notarised deposition submitted to the French investigation in June this year, Nyamwasa denied witness testimony that tied him to the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane, and said Kagame had instigated the attack, which also claimed the life of the then president of Burundi.

In his deposition, Nyamwasa said that on April 6, 1994 he heard Kagame himself say that “Habyarimana’s plane was brought down by our own (RPF) forces”.