Felicien Kabuga, suspected of financing the 1994 Rwandan genocide, has been moved from France to The Hague to stand trial on charges of genocide, a UN tribunal said Monday.
“His initial appearance will be held in due course before a judge of the trial chamber assigned to his case,” the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement.
After noting that Kabuga had evaded arrest for more than 22 years, the court recalled the charges of “genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and extermination and persecution as crimes against humanity.”
Once one of Rwanda’s richest men, Kabuga is accused of having helped create the Interahamwe Hutu militia group and the Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines, whose broadcasts incited people to murder, and of helping to buy machetes in 1993 that were distributed to genocidal groups.
More than two decades after he was first indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in November 1997, Kabuga was arrested near Paris on May 16.
His lawyers initially asked that he be put on trial in France, but late last month the country’s top court ruled that he could be transferred to the UN tribunal.
On Monday, the tribunal’s statement identified three judges charged with carrying out the trial: Iain Bonomy, Graciela Susana Gatti Santana, and Elizabeth Ibanda-Nahamya.
