Rwandan President Cleared Of 1994 Plane Attack
Rwandan President Cleared Of 1994 Plane Attack
A new report has found missile fire that brought down the Rwandan president’s plane in 1994 came from a military camp and not from Tutsi rebels. The French investigation appears to exonerate current Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who was the leader of the Tutsi rebels at the time of the assassination. The findings did not specifically lay blame.
The April 1994 crash was one of the triggers for the genocide of 800,000 Tutsi people. Diplomatic relations between Rwanda and France were broken off in 2006 when a French judge said Kagame had orchestrated the assassination of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana to trigger the bloodshed.
Kagame has maintained that Hutu hardliners shot down the plane to provide a pretext for carrying out the genocide.
‘Today’s findings constitute vindication for Rwanda’s long-held position on the circumstances surrounding events of April 1994,’ Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said in a statement.
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