France’s top appeals court has agreed to the extradition of Rwandan genocide suspect Félicien Kabuga to face trial in Tanzania.
Kabuga’s legal team fought against the extradition, asking instead to have him face trial in France. The Court of Cassation ruled there was no legal or medical hindrance to executing an international warrant for Kabuga’s transfer to the tribunal in Arusha.
In May, Kabuga was arrested by French authorities for allegedly being one of the main benefactors of the genocide. Kabuga’s RTLM radio station incited the attacks in which ethnic Hutu extremists slaughtered about 800,000 Rwandans.
Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes (allegedly provided by Kabuga), burned alive, or shot.
In 1998, Kabuga was indicted “on seven counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, persecution and extermination, all in relation to crimes committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda,” according to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
He managed to evade capture for 26 years.
Kabuga was spotlighted on Netflix’s “World’s Most Wanted”, which documented the rise of RTLM and how it became the catalyst for the homicide, as well as Kabuga’s 26-year-long stretch on the run.
In the documentary, Louis-Gonzague Munyazogeye, a survivor of the genocide, recalled his feelings the time he witnessed Kabuga arriving in Switzerland in 1994.
“Kabuga arrived here with two minibusses and a lot of suitcases,” he says, pointing points to a former a refugee registration center where Kabuga had gone to seek asylum for him and his entire family. “So an unusual way of entering a refugee center. The others usually came with a small backpack and nothing else.”
