Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga has been on the run for 26 years, evading arrest but that has ended with his arrest.
French justice ministry said Kabuga accused of funding militias that massacred about 800,000 people, was arrested on Saturday near Paris.
French gendarmes arrested him on Saturday morning in a flat in Asnieres-Sur-Seine where he was living under a false identity.
The 84-year-old was Rwanda’s most-wanted man and had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head.
“Since 1994, Felicien Kabuga, known to have been the financier of Rwanda genocide, had with impunity stayed in Germany, Belgium, Congo-Kinshasa, Kenya, or Switzerland,” the French ministry statement said.
The UN-established International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) indicted him in 1997 on seven criminal counts including genocide, complicity in genocide and incitement to commit genocide, all in relation to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
“The arrest of Félicien Kabuga today is a reminder that those responsible for genocide can be brought to account, even twenty-six years after their crimes,” the IRMCT’s Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz said in a statement.
Kabugu was a Hutu businessman accused of funding militias that killed` some 800,000 Tutsis and their moderate Hutu allies over a span of 100 days in 1994.
The two Rwandan ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, fought a civil war in the early 1990s.
Source: Africafeeds.com
