Rwanda summons German envoy over Kagame aide arrest

November 10, 2008

KIGALI (AFP) — Rwanda has summoned Germany’s ambassador to Kigali to protest against the arrest of a top aide to President Paul Kagame on suspicion of participating in an assassination that sparked the 1994 genocide, an official said on Monday. Kagame’s chief of protocol Rose Kabuye was arrested on Sunday at Frankfurt airport on an international warrant issued in 2006 by French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere. “Our foreign affairs minister yesterday summoned the German ambassador to protest. Kabuye was on an official mission and enjoys diplomatic immunity,” Information Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said. “She is an innocent woman who was arrested on a politically motivated warrant, a warrant issued on the basis of manipulated investigations,” Mushikiwabo told AFP. “This blackmail cannot continue anymore.”

Kabuye is the first Rwandan to be arrested out of nine warrants issued by Bruguiere against close Kagame aides whom the judge suspects of being behind the death of former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down in April 1994 in an assassination which triggered ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis and which led to the genocide. The arrest warrants sparked a bilateral diplomatic row resulting in Rwanda suspending ties with France.