The judge in charge of this investigation ordered on December 24, in accordance with the requisitions of the public prosecutor’s office that Bucyibaruta who was the Prefect of Gikongoro Prefect, now Nyaruguru and Nyamagabe Districts of the Southern Province, be sent the ‘Court d’Assises’ of Paris.
He is suspected of being an accomplice to acts of genocide and crimes against humanity between April and July 1994, committed in the genocide that saw more than a million Tutsi killed.
Bucyibaruta is in among other accusations, accused of the role in the murder of a Rwandan gendarme and three priests, as well as rapes.
“We will appeal in the few days coming because there are a number of exculpatory evidence in this file, “Ghislain Mabonga Monga, a lawyer for Bucyibaruta, told AFP.
“It was a decision we had been waiting for a very long time, “reacted Alain Gauthier, the President of the ‘Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda’ (SCRC), an association that tracks alleged génocidaires.
“We can only rejoice, especially since it adds to other advances” in the Rwandan genocide file, he said.
In his order, the Judge Alexandre Baillon believes that the former prefect, who has been a refugee in France since 1997 where he is under judicial control, has “made himself complicit in a massive and systematic practice of summary executions” against people grouped on certain sites as well as “people arrested at roundabouts and barriers, inspired by political, philosophical, racial or religious motives and organized in execution of a concerted plan against a group of civilian population, in this case the population Tutsi.”
Bucyibaruta was also wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), accused of ordering the Interahamwe (Hutu extremists) who were under his command to commit several massacres against Tutsi.
The ICTR, which had divested itself in favor of French courts, was said in 2013 concerned about the slowness of the French justice in handling this case.
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