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France’s top court on Tuesday confirmed that a probe should be closed into the shooting down of a presidential plane that triggered the 1994 Rwanda genocide, ending a two-decade legal saga.
The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal by families of people killed in the missile attack on president Juvenal Habyarimana’s aircraft on April 6, 1994.
They had asked judges to reverse a lower court’s decision to abandon the case against people close to current President Paul Kagame.
Relations between Paris and Kigali had long been strained by the probe and its associated arrest warrants.
“The investigation was complete and sufficient charges did not exist against anyone for committing the alleged crimes, nor any other infraction,” the Court of Cassation found.
“Of course this decision disappoints the Rwandan plaintiffs, but in reality the harm has long since been done,” said Philippe Meilhac, a lawyer for Habyarimana’s widow Agathe.
Defence lawyers Leon-Lef Forster and Bernard Maingain called the decision “a clear legal victory for the Rwandan soldiers unjustly accused” by a French judge in 2006, claiming that the probe “had a distinct whiff of politics” about it.
“The defence hopes that the battle fought on the legal front will also help do justice to the one million victims of the genocide against the Tutsi,” they added.
The Falcon 50 plane was carrying Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira from a summit in Tanzania, where they had been discussing the crisis in the two countries and continuing negotiations with Kagame, then leader of the mostly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) rebel group.
Its downing is widely seen as the spark that ignited the genocide in which more than 800,000 people are believed to have died – most from the Tutsi minority at the hands of Hutus.
Rwanda’s…
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Source : france24
