Rwanda's Kagame should face court-French judge

PARIS, Nov 21 (Reuters) A top French judge wants Rwandan President Paul Kagame brought before a UN court over a 1994 plane crash that killed the country's president and sparked a genocide, a judicial source said today.

Leading anti-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere is also seeking international arrest warrants against nine Kagame associates, including the military's chief of staff James Kabarebe and Rwanda's ambassador to India, the source said.

Rwanda's foreign minister dismissed the arrest warrants as an attempt to cover up what Rwanda says was France's role in training soldiers who carried out the genocide.

A warrant cannot be issued for Kagame himself because he has immunity but Bruguiere has written to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking for Kagame to be brought before the Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

Bruguiere believes Kagame was responsible for the plane crash that killed Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and triggered a genocide of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the judicial source said.

Paris public prosecutor Jean-Claude Morin has approved the warrants, which could be issued soon, the source added.

Bruguiere has been investigating the Habyarimana crash since 1998, when a complaint was filed by the families of the French crew flying the plane and Habyarimana's widow Agathe.

At the time of the crash, Kagame was the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front that defeated the Habyarimana government's Hutu militias to end the genocide triggered by the president's death.

Kagame, a Tutsi, blames France for training soldiers they knew would later commit genocide, a charge Paris has denied.

''COVER UP'' In Kigali, Foreign Affairs Minister Charles Murigande said the arrest warrants were a French attempt at a cover up.

''The French are trying to appease their conscience for their role in the genocide and are now trying to find someone else to hold responsible for their acts here,'' Murigande told Reuters.

''They have panicked because they know their acts during the genocide were going to be exposed to the rest of the world in the on-going probe commission here,'' he said today.

Though Rwanda was a Belgian colony until independence in 1962, France kept close links with the Francophone nation from 1975 to 1994, giving financial and military support.

France sent troops to Rwanda at the height of the genocide under a UN-authorised operation, saying it was safeguarding the provision of food and emergency medical services of humanitarian organisations.

It has said tens of thousands of Tutsis were saved in the area where they were sent and a French parliamentary probe in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said ''strategic errors'' had been made.

In November 2005 an official judicial investigation was launched into complaints by six Rwandan massacre survivors who accused France of complicity in crimes against humanity.

Genocide survivors in the hilltop village of Bisesero said French soldiers told Tutsis they would protect them, then herded them to a place where they were later hacked to death by Hutus.

A Rwandan government-appointed commission last month launched a probe into the actions of French troops.

REUTERS PDM HT1614