A French judge has issued international arrest warrants for nine Rwandan officials he suspects plotted the 1994 killing of Rwanda's president, triggering the nation's genocide, judicial officials said Thursday. The nine officials are close to Rwanda's current president, Paul Kagame, the officials said. French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued the warrants Wednesday, after the prosecutor's office approved them Monday, the officials said. The arrest warrants target ranking Rwandans whom Bruguiere suspects were behind the downing of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana's airplane on April 6, 1994, as well as those suspected of allegedly executing the plot. The killing set off the massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the central African nation by extremists members of the Hutu majority. Some 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were killed in 100 days. According to Bruguiere's order, Kagame allegedly instructed his rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, or RPF, to shoot down the plane. «The investigations undertaken have clearly shown that for the RPF, the physical elimination of President Juvenal Habyarimana was the necessary precondition for seizing power by force, and was inscribed in a vast plan worked out to this end,» Bruguiere wrote in the warrant request. A copy was obtained by The Associated Press. «The final order to attack the presidential plane was given by Paul Kagame himself during a meeting held in Mulindi on March 31, 1994,» the document said. Kagame lashed out Wednesday against Bruguiere and his allegations, calling the judge «an impostor, a politician» in an interview with France-Culture radio. «There is no doubt» that ties between France and Rwanda will suffer, he said. Speaking to the BBC, the president said the allegations have «been recycled over the last five years by this French judge, and it's not really a judicial process as such, it's a political process.» Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande also rejected the accusation, telling AP Television News that it was «a continuation of an ongoing war being waged against this regime by these French circles.
