Germany was set yesterday to extradite a Rwandan presidential aide to France to face anti-terror judges probing the downing of a former Rwandan president’s jet, an attack which triggered a genocide.
French investigators believe that Rose Kabuye, chief of protocol to President Paul Kagame, played a role in the 1994 attack, which killed presidents Juvenal Habyarima of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi.
Following his assassination, Habyarima’s ethnic Hutu supporters launched a campaign of slaughter that left 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead.
PHOTO: AFP
Two French pilots died in the plane, leading France to launch an inquiry which has fouled the already bitter relations between Kagame’s government and Paris, which he accuses of supporting Rwanda’s genocidal former regime.
Kabuye, a 47-year-old former mayor of Kigali and military leader in Kagame’s successful war to overthrow the government and halt the killings, was arrested in Frankfurt on Nov. 9 on a private visit to Germany.
German officials were to hand her over yesterday to French judges two years after they first issued international warrants for nine Rwandans they suspected of playing a role in the attack on the plane.
She faces indictment on a charge of “complicity in murder in relation to a terrorist attack” and judges may attempt to have her remanded in custody to await trial, a move that would further enrage Rwanda.
“We’re impatient to hear what the prosecution has to say about custody, it will be a key moment in the investigation,” Kabuye’s lawyer Bernard Maingain said, insisting the defendant could live in France while awaiting trial.
“Mrs Kabuye is calm. She’s a real fighter. You must know she faced other battles. She spent years in the bush after her family was expelled from Rwanda in the 1950s,” he said.
Kagame held a news conference on Monday in Kigali to denounce France and Kabuye’s arrest, declaring: “It is not only Rose who is in the dock, it is Rwanda that is in the dock.”
Kagame’s government, which accuses France of having supported the Hutu militias who massacred members of the Tutsi minority 14 years ago, says Europe is persecuting the genocide’s survivors instead of hunting its perpetrators.
“They indict people falsely to cover their own responsibility,” Kagame said.
The 2006 French warrants led to Rwanda severing its diplomatic ties with France. Three days of street demonstrations were organized in the streets of Kigali following Kabuye’s arrest and more are planned.
Judicial sources in Kigali have said that Rwandan justice could soon issue warrants and indictments against some of the 33 political and military French officials named in a Rwandan report on France’s role in the genocide.
“Possible indictments are part of many things we could do with the report. It will depend on many factors. For sure, the report will lead to something,” Kagame said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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