{{France plans to hold its first trial resulting from the Rwandan genocide as the 20th anniversary of the attempt to eliminate the country’s ethnic Tutsi population approaches, the lawyer who will prosecute the case said. }}
Pascal Simbikangwa, who headed Rwanda’s intelligence agency in 1994, is set to stand trial later this year or early in 2014, Simon Foreman told reporters at his office in Paris.
Simbikangwa is accused of organizing and arming militias, torturing Tutsis and preparing lists of people to be killed.
Simbikangwa’s lawyers Alexandra Bourgeot and Epstein Fabrice said yesterday that their client denies all the allegations against him. They declined to comment further.
The approaching anniversary makes the issue of the genocide suspects in France “impossible to ignore,” Foreman said on Jan 18.
France’s judiciary would “hate to reach that anniversary” without a trial, he said.
Simbikangwa, who moves with the aid of a wheelchair, was arrested on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean in 2008. He is being held in prison in France.
First filed case against Simbikangwa was in February 2009.
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