One of the World's 'Most Wanted' Gets Arrested

Felicien Kabuga has been accused of equipping militias in the 1994 Rwandan genocide
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted May 16, 2020 12:30 PM CDT
One of the World's 'Most Wanted' Gets Arrested
In this Friday, April 5, 2019 file photo, family photographs of some of those who died hang on display in an exhibition at the Kigali Genocide Memorial centre in the capital Kigali, Rwanda.   (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)

One of the most wanted fugitives in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, a wealthy businessman accused of supplying machetes to killers and broadcasting propaganda urging mass slaughter, has been arrested outside Paris, the AP reports. Felicien Kabuga, who had a $5 million bounty on his head, had been accused of equipping militias in the genocide that killed more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus who tried to protect them. The 84-year-old Kabuga was arrested as a result of a joint investigation with the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals office of the prosecutor, French authorities said. He had been living in a town north of Paris, Asnieres-Sur-Seine, under an assumed name, the appeals court's prosecutor's office said.

The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted Kabuga in 1997 on charges related to conspiracy to commit genocide, persecution and extermination. Rwandan prosecutors have said financial documents found in the capital, Kigali, after the genocide indicated that Kabuga used dozens of his companies to import vast quantities of machetes that were used to slaughter people. The wealthy businessman also was accused of establishing the station Radio Television Mille Collines that broadcast vicious propaganda against the ethnic Tutsi, as well as training and equipping the Interahamwe militia that led the killing spree. "An important step towards justice for hundreds of thousands of genocide victims," Mausi Segun, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said of his arrest.

(More genocide stories.)

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