PARIS — More than a decade after the genocide, a mystery still lies at the heart of Rwanda's darkness.
But France's most celebrated anti-terrorism magistrate believes he knows who assassinated two African presidents on April 6, 1994. The shooting down of the Rwandan presidential jet that night was followed by the killings of an estimated 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi minority.
In a report to French prosecutors late last year, Magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere accused the Tutsi leader who is now president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, of ordering the assassination.
The investigation includes allegations that U.S. and U.N. officials helped quash earlier inquiries to protect Kagame, an ally of the United States.
The French judge's report, which was obtained by The Times, has caused an uproar in Africa and Europe, and led Kagame's government to break off relations with France.
A United Nations tribunal is judging perpetrators of the genocide, but the ghosts of Rwanda still haunt a world community that failed to intervene. French investigators do not claim that the assassination was the sole cause of the genocide. Tensions already were growing between Tutsis and Rwanda's majority Hutus. But Bruguiere alleges that Kagame sacrificed fellow Tutsis in a brutal "political calculation" aimed at toppling the Hutu-dominated government.
"Kagame deliberately chose a modus operandi that, in the particularly tense environment ... between the Hutu and Tutsi communities, could only cause bloody retaliation against the Tutsi community," says the judge's report, which recommends that prosecutors file formal charges.
Former U.N. investigators who initially looked into the assassination told Bruguiere that their bosses had blocked efforts to pursue leads implicating Kagame. The 67-page French report presents testimony from exiled Kagame bodyguards, spies and commanders. They identified a commando team that allegedly shot down the plane, killing President Juvenal Habyarimana and the president of neighboring Burundi, as well as their aides and the French crew.
In November, Bruguiere issued warrants for nine high-ranking Rwandan officials in the investigation, which he opened in response to a complaint from the widow of one of the French pilots. The judge also urged a U.N. war crimes tribunal on Rwanda to investigate Kagame, who as a head of state is immune from prosecution.
