Assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira

On the evening of April 6, 1994, the airplane carrying the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali. Both presidents died when the plane crashed. Responsibility for the attack is heavily disputed, with both the RPF and Hutu extremists being blamed. Regardless of who carried out the attack, it was widely seen as a signal to begin the mass killings.

Although the exact responsibility for these assassinations has not been established with certainty, one theory is that Paul Kagame, the leader of the RPF who later became President of Rwanda, ordered the plane to be shot down. According to Steven Edwards, in "'Explosive Leak on Rwanda Genocide," published in the Canadian National Post on January 3, 2000, initially, "UN investigators believed that Hutu extremists within Mr. Habyarimana's family circle had killed him," since, "at the time, he was involved in talks that aimed at sharing power with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a mainly Tutsi rebel army in which Mr. Kagame was a military leader." But "just three senior UN officials" were given access to this "extremely sensitive . . . confidential report" obtained by the National Post, containing "explosive" claims that Habyarimana's assassination was actually carried out by members of the RPF with foreign help:

Three Tutsi informants told UN investigators in 1997 that they were part of an elite strike team that assassinated the Hutu president in 1994, shedding new light on an event that triggered the genocide of at least 500,000 people in Rwanda . . . [and] that the killing of president Juvenal Habyarimana was carried out "with the assistance of a foreign government" under the overall command of Paul Kagame. . . . The informants told the investigators that the [Rwandan Patriotic] front decided to kill Mr. Habyarimana because the group was not pleased with the slow pace of the talks.

Lieutenant Abdul Ruzibiza specifically accuses Kagame of Habyarimana's assassination; in his 2005 book, Rwanda. L’histoire secrete, he accuses Kagame of directly planning it in a meeting at RPF headquarters in Mulindi (Byumba, northern Rwanda) on March 31, 1994. (Cf.)

Other scholars point to evidence that suggests that Hutu leaders themselves assassinated Habyarimana, out of anger for signing the Arusha records, and to facilitate the elimination of all Tutsis.

The identity of those behind the attack of 6 April 1994 is still poorly understood today. The source of the missiles that destroyed the presidential airplane is subject to much controversy, controversy which is even more relevant as the attack was the prelude to one of the worst horrors ever seen on the African continent.

Several hypotheses have been advanced and have been examined by the Belgian [1] and French [2] parliaments, as well as by the United Nations [3]. The two most plausible explanations accuse one of the groups of Hutu extremists, distressed by the advancement of negations with the FPR, the political and military adversary of the current regime. Among the other hypothesises that have been examined, there is one that implicates the French military, although there is no clear motive for a French attack on the Rwandan government.

The FPR and president Paul Kagame have always denied any involvement in the attack, however a recent French investigation lead by Jean-Louis Bruguière concluded differently (Le Monde 10 March 2004 and following days). The French newspaper Le Monde annotated Bruguière's report, but it was not published. The investigation has since been suspended.

The UN has never investigated the attack. In front of the Belgian senate, the person mandated by the UN to lead the investigation, Mr Degni-Segui, declared that he was not able to get a hold of the required components for his work from France, nor from the FAR. On the other hand, the French captain, Paul Barril, alleged on French television to possess the black box of the plane. It seems that, according to witnesses as well as General Roméo Dallaire, the French troops surrendered the debris of the device after the attack, even though officially, only the presidential guard had access to it. The judicial and political complexity of the affair seemed to require the nomination of an investigation committee; however the UN refused, citing a "budgeting error."

The airplane's black box was the subject of a wild reportage in 2004. Apparently found by the UN, after the insistence of the French newspaper, Le Monde, an expert revealed that it could not be the one from Habyarimana's airplane. Anyway, this box, which has become mythological, is unlikely to reveal anything about those who launched the missiles.

Some conspiracy theorists claim that the US CIA was involved in Habyarimana's assassination.