Rwandan genocide suspect Kabuga dies

Felicien Kabuga, a suspect in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and alleged mastermind of a radio station that incited the massacres, died on Saturday, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said. The 90‑year‑old was reported to have passed away in a hospital earlier that day.

Once one of the world’s most‑wanted fugitives, Kabuga was frequently described as the financier of the killings that claimed around 800,000 lives between April and June 1994.

After years of evading capture with a series of false passports and a network of former Rwandan allies, he was arrested in Paris in 2020. He had previously fled to Switzerland in July 1994, where he was expelled a month later, then moved to Kinshasa and later to Kenya, evading three police arrest attempts.

In 2002, the United States offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest and financed a media campaign in Kenya that displayed his photograph across the country.

Following his capture, Kabuga was transferred to The Hague, where he faced charges of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity, including extermination and murder.

Prosecutors alleged that, once Rwanda’s richest man, he was the driving force behind Radio‑Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a station that urged ethnic Hutus to kill Tutsis with machetes. He was also accused of “distributing machetes” to genocidal groups and ordering them to kill Tutsis.

His defence lawyers argued that he was merely a businessman with a limited role at RTLM, which had portrayed Tutsis as “cockroaches” to be exterminated. They denied that he supplied machetes or supported the Interahamwe Hutu militia.

Kabuga pleaded not guilty.

The trial in The Hague attracted close attention in Rwanda, but Kabuga himself did not attend and did not watch proceedings via videolink.

In 2023, judges suspended the trial, ruling that the wheelchair‑bound Kabuga was “unfit to participate meaningfully” in the proceedings, while ordering him to remain detained pending provisional release.

At the time of his death, he was awaiting release to a country willing to accept him.

Presiding judge Graciela Gatti Santana has ordered a full inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Kabuga’s death.

Vanguard News

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