\n France's top court on Tuesday confirmed that a probe should be closed into the shooting down of a presidential plane that triggered the 1994 Rwanda genocide, ending a two-decade legal saga.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal by families of people killed in the missile attack on president Juvenal Habyarimana's aircraft on April 6, 1994.\n<\/p>\n
\n They had asked judges to reverse a lower court's decision to abandon the case against people close to current President Paul Kagame.\n<\/p>\n
\n Relations between Paris and Kigali had long been strained by the probe and its associated arrest warrants.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The investigation was complete and sufficient charges did not exist against anyone for committing the alleged crimes, nor any other infraction,\" the Court of Cassation found.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Falcon 50 plane was carrying Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira from a summit in Tanzania, where they had been discussing the crisis in the two countries and continuing negotiations with Kagame, then leader of the mostly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).\n<\/p>\n
\n Its downing is widely seen as the spark that ignited the genocide in which more than 800,000 people are believed to have died -- most from the Tutsi minority at the hands of Hutus.\n<\/p>\n
\n Rwanda's representative at the UN said at the time that the plane was shot down by \"enemies of the peace,\" while the defence ministry said \"unidentified elements\" were responsible.\n<\/p>\n
\n Relatives of the French flight crew turned to the courts in 1998.\n<\/p>\n
\n French investigators long suspected that Kagame's rebels fired on the flight as it landed in the Rwandan capital.\n<\/p>\n
\n Later they chased up the theory that Hutu extremists unsatisfied with the moderate Habyarimana were behind the attack, with no more success.\n<\/p>\n
\n But a French expert report found in 2012 that the plane was hit by missiles fired from a camp occupied by Habyarimana's own presidential guard.\n<\/p>\n
\n Defending their dropping the case in December 2018, the investigating magistrates said there was a \"lack of indisputable material evidence,\" and this left the charges resting on witness accounts that were \"mostly contradictory or impossible to verify.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n They also underlined the \"detrimental atmosphere\" around the case, including killings, disappearances of witnesses and manipulation of testimony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
France's top court on Tuesday confirmed that a probe should be closed into the shooting down of a presidential plane that triggered the 1994 Rwanda genocide, ending a two-decade legal saga. The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal by families of people killed in the missile attack on president Juvenal Habyarimana's aircraft on April 6, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-87585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n