Felicien Kabuga, indicted on charges of genocide related to the 1994 Rwandan massacre of some 800,000 people, appeared before a French court on Wednesday, four days after his arrest following a quarter of a century on the run.
In his first appearance in public in more than two decades, the octogenarian was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair, dressed in jeans and a blue jumper and wearing a face mask.
His lawyers said in a statement ahead of the hearing that Kabuga had the right to be presumed innocent and opposed being transferred from France to a UN tribunal that handles crimes against humanity based in Tanzania.The court will decide whether to hand Kabuga to the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. The international court is based in the Hague, Netherlands and Arusha, Tanzania.
Kabuga's voice was weak, but audible, as he confirmed through an interpreter his identity and parents names. He gave his date of birth as March 1, 1933.A one-time tea and coffee tycoon, he is accused of being a main financier of the genocide, paying for the militias that carried out the massacres, as well as importing huge numbers of machetes, according to the UN tribunal's indictment.
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