DOS_patos
Unverified Legion of Trill member
French police seized the man regarded as the intellectual and financial mastermind behind the Rwandan genocide on Saturday, ending a transcontinental 26-year manhunt for “the Eichmann of Africa”.
Félicien Kabuga, Africa’s most wanted fugitive, was arrested in the northern outskirts of Paris after a dawn raid on his flat in the commune of Asnières-sur-Seine. Officers said the 84 year-old had been living there under an assumed identity.
French authorities released few details about the operation, beyond hailing the capture of “one of the world’s most wanted fugitives”. It is believed that a series of simultaneous raids were carried out on addresses across France, some linked to Kabuga’s children, to ensure that he did not escape.
Those familiar with the investigation suggested that the operation, at least in terms of the painstaking intelligence work involved, had echoes of the Mossad mission to seize the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from Buenos Aires in 1960.
The British security services played an “essential” role in the operation that led to Kabuga’s capture, according to United Nations prosecutors. So, too, did investigators in the United States, which has long had a $5 million (£4.1m) bounty on his head, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
Kabuga will not be sedated and spirited away to Rwanda in the way Eichmann was smuggled into Israel, where he was tried and hanged for his role as a primary architect of the Final Solution.
Instead he will eventually be handed over to a United Nations tribunal to answer longstanding charges of crimes against humanity.
Even so there will be considerable relief in Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered over a 100-day period in 1994 — a massacre carried out by a cabal of Hutu extremists with Kabuga, one of the country’s richest men, allegedly at its core.
Without the fortune he acquired through his tea and coffee estates, the genocide might never happened have happened.
In 1992, Kabuga ploughed money into Radio Television Libres Milles Collines (RTLM), a radio station that steadily dripped hatred towards the country’s Tutsi minority.
The following year, he allegedly began to import into the country hundreds of thousands of machetes, which were doled out to the Interahamwe, an extremist Hutu militia accused of overseeing much of the slaughter.
As the genocide began, Interahamwe militiamen, wearing uniforms reportedly provided by Kabuga, were transported from killing site to killing site in his organisation’s vehicles, investigators say.
Meanwhile, Radio Milles Collines provided the soundtrack of the genocide, urging Hutus to hunt down and kill the Tutsi “inyenzi”, or cockroaches. “The graves are only half full,” the station’s presenters would warn. “We must complete the task.”
After the genocide, which ended when Tutsi rebels led by Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s president, swept into the capital Kigali, Kabuga vanished.
After a quarter of a century of leads that grew ever colder, many had given up hope of bringing him to justice.