Rwanda genocide suspect home goes for Christmas

The Associated PressPublished: December 23, 2008



KIGALI, Rwanda: A senior Rwandan official arrested in Europe in connection with the death of Rwanda's former president will be allowed to fly home for Christmas, the government said Tuesday.

In Germany, federal prosecutors announced that another Rwandan, a town mayor, was arrested Monday on suspicion of genocide.

The senior official, Rose Kabuye — chief of protocol for current President Paul Kagame — was detained in Germany Nov. 9 and later transferred to France. She is held in connection with the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwanda's former president Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994, The assassination sparked 100 days of genocide that killed more than 500,000 people.

French authorities are investigating the attack because Habyarimana's two pilots were French. A judge authorized her Christmas leave. Rwandan justice minister Tharcisse Karugarama says Kabuye will return to Rwanda on Wednesday and return to Paris on Jan. 10 to appear before a French judge.

"The government of Rwanda considers this development a step in the right direction," a Rwandan government statement said. ... "Outstanding arrest warrants against Rwandan officials should be nullified, as there is no need to arrest and humiliate individuals who have never been asked and refused to cooperate with justice."



In a separate development, a former Rwandan mayor suspected of involvement in the central African country's genocide was arrested.

The 51-year-old man, identified only by the initials O.R., was arrested in the Frankfurt area on Monday, federal prosecutors said.

They said the man is a Hutu who served in 1994 as the mayor of a municipality in northern Rwanda and allegedly called for, led and coordinated killings of Tutsis. In particular, he is believed to have been involved in a massacre at Nyarubuye in mid-April 1994, prosecutors said.

The Rwandan government did not comment on his arrest.

More than 500,000 minority Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority were killed in the slaughter, which was organized by the extremist Hutu government then in power. Government troops, Hutu militia and ordinary villagers spurred on by hate messages broadcast over the radio went from village to village, butchering men, women and children.

German federal prosecutors said the 51-year-old former mayor was previously arrested in Frankfurt in April on a Rwandan extradition request, but was released again in early November after judicial authorities decided that they could not extradite him.

German prosecutors said his second arrest was based on information that they gleaned in their own investigation, begun in March. They did not elaborate.