Kagame snubs genocide claim

2004-03-11 20:34

Brussels - Rwandan President Paul Kagame dismissed on Thursday a report implicating him in a 1994 assassination that sparked the genocide in his country as "invented," and accused France of being behind the allegation.

"Firstly, the accusations are not new," Kagame told the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique, referring to a report in the French daily Le Monde linking him to the killing of former president Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.

"Secondly nobody in the French establishment has the right to make any judgment on the responsibility for events in Rwanda in 1994," he added in an interview with the paper.

Asked if there could have been a "political intent by the French government behind the Le Monde accusations," he replied: "I have no doubt about that."

Le Monde reported on Tuesday that the anti-terrorist division of the French judicial police had concluded that Kagame ordered the rocket attack that shot down a plane carrying Habyarimana as it came in to land at Kigali airport.

A report of an investigation led by Parisian judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere names Kagame as the main decision-maker in the attack, which sparked the 100 days of bloodletting in Rwanda that left up to a million people dead, most of them ethnic Tutsis, it said.

"I cannot comment on what judge Bruguiere may have found or may have fabricated," said Kagame, himself a Tutsi, but added: "The story is invented."

Kagame arrived in Brussels on Wednesday for a three-day visit, and met EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana at the start of his trip. On Thursday he was to meet Belgium's King Albert II, Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Foreign Minister Louis Michel.

- AFP