The formal indictment for complicity in murder and criminal conspiracy for her alleged role in the attack, on 6 April 1994, of the plane of President Habyarimana, Mrs. Kabuye was granted bail Wednesday evening but was placed under judicial supervision.
Ruzibiza's retraction was initially made on the airwaves of the Rwandan private radio station Contact FM, then in various newspapers, including the French newspaper Libération, where he explained that the commando "network" which he had described, saying he was himself a member of it, "never existed". It is "purely and simply an invention", he added, without explaining why he told lies.
In an interview with the French radio station France-Culture, he affirmed that the chief of protocol of the head of the Rwandan state "never had anything to do with these operations (the plane attack). "She is not involved".
Ruzibiza considers himself a victim of "political manipulation". He specified to be "not along with Judge Bruguière (...) because I saw political manipulation. The list of accused does not correspond at all to what I or others would have said. I see falsifications of names, really illogical things".
Questioned by the Hirondelle Agency, Claudine Vidal and André Guichaoua, the two sociologists who wrote the preface and epilogue in Ruzibiza's book published in 2005, stress that these retractions relate only to the attack to which he devotes 15 pages out of 494. "We had the occasion to verify, before the publication of the book, that a number of information given by the author was also told by other testimonies, others than those known by Ruzibiza", the two researchers affirmed.
"Today, they specify, we are not convinced that Ruzibiza can prove that he lied about all of it since 2003 and in particular before the ICTR, that it be on the attack or on other points. As for the motives of the Ruzibiza's retraction, the two French academics added, we only know what he said and that we do not have to discuss it. It belongs to the concerned courts to react to this claim of false testimony.
PB/ER/MM/SC/GF
© Hirondelle News Agency