Spain indicts 40 Rwandan officers

The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994, after an airplane carrying the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda, both Hutus, was shot down. An estimated 500,000 people, most of them Tutsis, were slaughtered over a period of 100 days. Tutsi-led rebels commanded by Kagame ended the genocide by defeating radical Hutus in July 1994 but unleashed more atrocities, the Spanish indictment says.

By some counts, 800,000 people were slain before the violence ended.

The Spanish case is potentially groundbreaking because it is focusing on crimes blamed on Kagame and his forces, something that a United Nations tribunal set up in 1994 to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda has not done.

"This will increase pressure on the" U.N. court, said Alison Des Forges, senior advisor to the Africa division of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The Spanish case also goes beyond the work of the U.N. court because it includes crimes allegedly committed in refugee camps in neighboring countries where the Tanzania-based international tribunal does not have jurisdiction.

Kagame has previously been accused of plotting the downing of the presidential aircraft, a charge he denied.

The allegations first appeared in French media in 2004.

Two years later, a French judge indicted nine senior Rwandan officials close to Kagame. But arrest warrants for those men have been routinely flouted in Africa, Des Forges said, and the case has languished.

Andreu opened his investigation based on complaints from the families of six Spanish priests and three Spanish doctors slain in Rwanda. In 2005, several African groups petitioned the judge to include Rwandan victims, and, under the universal jurisdiction doctrine, Andreu agreed to expand the indictment.

"This is the kind of thing that can and should happen when you have massive crimes that have essentially gone unpunished," said Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch.

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wilkinson@latimes.com