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.

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