France drops probe into attack that triggered Rwanda genocide

Investigative magistrates in France have dropped charges against nine Rwandan officials investigated over the death of the country’s president in 1998, an event that led to a genocide that killed more than 800,000 people, a judicial source said.

His assassination triggered 100 days of bloodshed.

The probe has been a major source of tension between the two countries after seven people close to current Rwandan president Paul Kagame were charged in the French investigation.

French prosecutors had requested the probe be dismissed in October due to insufficient evidence against the seven suspects.

At the time, lawyers for Habyarimana's widow called the prosecutors' move "unacceptable" and "largely politically motivated".

Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was killed in a missile strike on his plane near Kigali's airport in April 1994.

Kigali has long accused France of complicity in the genocide by supporting the Hutu regime, training the soldiers and militiamen who carried out the killings.

France launched the investigation, that also targeted Rwanda’s former defence minister James Kabarebe, in 1998 following demands by relatives of the French crew who died when president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was downed.

The investigation and accusations by Rwandan officials that France was complicit in the 1994 genocide damaged relations between the two countries for several years.

The judicial source said on Wednesday that the charges were dropped on December 21.

Rwanda said on December 24 that it welcomed the definitive end of what it called a politically-motivated investigation.

The first judge to lead the probe, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, backed the theory that it was Tutsi militants from the former rebellion led by Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), who shot down the plane.

The French probe was closed but eventually reopened in 2016 before hitting a series of legal obstacles over the past two years.

A Rwandan commission had in 2009 found Hutu extremists responsible for the assassination of Habyarimana.