French authorities on Tuesday arrested Agathe Habyarimana, widow of assassinated Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, after Rwanda accused her of helping to plan the country’s 1994 genocide. <\/p>\n
According to French officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, the 67-year-old exile was detained in the Paris region shortly before 8:00am (0700 GMT) by officers executing an international arrest warrant issued by Rwanda.<\/p>\n
President Habyarimana of Rwanda was killed in April 1994 when his jet was hit by a ground-to-air missile as it began a descent towards Kigali.<\/p>\n
The president’s death served as a pretext for some of his hardline ethnic Hutu supporters to launch what was an apparently pre-planned massacre of minority Tutsis. More than 800,000 people died in the ensuing genocide.<\/p>\n
French troops evacuated Agathe Habyarimana as the bloodshed began, and she has been living in France despite claims by the country’s post-genocide Tutsi-led government that she helped plan the killings.<\/p>\n
Rwanda’s new government has used Habyarimana’s presence in France as evidence for their claim that Paris is protecting genocide suspects, but in October a court refused her request for political asylum.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to patch up relations with Kigali. Last week he went to Rwanda to meet his counterpart Paul Kagame, and admitted that France had made “mistakes” at the time of the killings.<\/p>\n
But it is not yet certain that Habyarimana will be tried in Rwanda.<\/p>\n
France has extradited some Rwandan suspects to Tanzania to face prosecution before an international UN-backed tribunal, but judges have so far ruled that genocide suspects can not hope for a fair trial in their homeland itself.<\/p>\n
Habyarimana is also the subject of criminal inquiries in France, including one for complicity in the genocide, but has not yet been questioned by judges.<\/p>\n
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