Rwanda genocide fugitive Felicen Kabuga, arrested in France in May after 26 years on the run, insisted he was Antoine Tounga from DR Congo – he had a legit Congolese passport in that name.
Interviews with 14 security officials and diplomats shed light on how Kabuga managed to live undetected for so long, despite the fact he had a $5 million bounty on his head and was facing seven counts of genocide and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
“It was a bombshell. Everyone had forgotten about him,” said Alain Gauthier who, with his Rwandan-born wife Dafroza, has tracked Rwandan genocide suspects for 20 years.
Investigators accuse Kabuga, 87, a one-time tea and coffee tycoon, of financing, arming and inciting Hutu militias. They also say he used a radio station that he had co-founded to fan ethnic hatred in Rwanda, a landlocked country in the heart of Africa.
Kabuga told a French court on May 27 that the charges laid against him by an international tribunal were lies. “I have not killed any Tutsis. I was working with them,” he said.
Kabuga was in bed in the flat in Asnieres-sur Seine, just a 25-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower, when the police burst in. At first he feigned confusion at an interpreter speaking Kinyarwanda, an official language of Rwanda. He responded in Kiswahili, a language spoken widely across central Africa. His name, he said, was Antoine Tounga and he came from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But a scar on his neck from 2007 throat surgery, which was detailed in an Interpol red “wanted” notice, gave him away. Two hours later, a DNA test proved that Tounga was indeed Kabuga.
The octogenarian had undergone the throat operation in Germany and it is still not clear when he moved to France, where he is now known to have lived for at least four years
Kabuga is being held in a Paris jail ahead of transfer to a U.N. tribunal in The Hague or Tanzania. Rights activists fear he might manage to escape justice once more.
“We can only regret that this arrest has come so late. Given his age and his health, we don’t know whether the tribunal will be able to complete his trial,” said Gauthier
