French Court Rejects Fresh Probe Of Plane Downing That Sparked Rwanda Genocide

Paris, July 3 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2020 ) :French appeals judges on Friday threw out a bid to reopen an investigation into the 1994 assassination of Rwanda's president which sparked a 100-day genocide that killed 800,000 people.

While families of those who died when Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down vowed to pursue their quest for justice, Rwanda dismissed the French process as a "complete farce".

The decades-long legal battle has poisoned relations between the two countries.

Habyarimana's widow Agathe and relatives of the French crew of the downed plane said they will seek to challenge Friday's decision before France's highest court.

The appeals court in Paris had been asked to revisit a 2018 decision to throw out a probe against nine members and former members of incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame's entourage.

After six months of deliberations, it handed down a 64-page judgment Friday confirming that decision.

A plane carrying Habyarimana, from Rwanda's Hutu majority, was shot down in Kigali on April 6, 1994, shattering a fragile peace process and triggering a killing spree targeting mainly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority, but also moderate Hutus.

The plane was struck by at least one missile as it came in to land at Kigali, also killing Burundi's president Cyprien Ntaryamira, another Hutu, on board.

A probe was opened in France in 1998 at the request of families of the French crew.