He was the man, it was said, who imported the hundreds of thousands of machetes that allowed countless ordinary people to act upon that hatred in one of the last genocides of the past century. One of the most-wanted fugitives of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Félicien Kabuga, was arrested Saturday morning in a rented home just outside Paris, protected by his children, the French authorities said. His arrest — considered the most important apprehension by an international tribunal in the past decade — could help bring long-awaited justice for his actions more than a generation after the killing of at least 800,000 and perhaps as many as one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the small central African nation. His trial could also help unravel some of the enduring mysteries of the killings, particularly how much planning went into the genocide, which also led to a catastrophic war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and continues to destabilize much of central Africa today. Stephen Rapp, a former chief prosecutor at the United Nations Rwanda tribunal, said that immediately after the genocide Mr. Kabuga fled to Switzerland, where he unsuccessfully applied for asylum, and was then seen in other European countries before settling in Kenya for several years. In the late 1990s, Mr. Kabuga was traced to a house owned by Hosea Kiplagat, a nephew of Kenya’s president at the time, Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, according to a report published in 2001 by the International Crisis Group, a research organization. The study also detailed how investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal uncovered evidence that a Kenyan police officermight have tipped off Mr. Kabuga in 1997 that an arrest was imminent. Extremist Hutus accused Tutsis of carrying out the assassination, eventually triggering 100 days of killings in which tens of thousands of Rwandans, including civilians, militia and the police, participated. He is accused of issuing them weapons, including several hundred thousand machetes imported from China, which were shipped to his companies, as well as providing them transport in his company’s vehicles. The indictment against him also alleges that his radio station, Radio-Television Mille Collines, incited the killings through broadcasts that directed roaming gangs of killers to roadblocks and sites where Tutsi could be located. All of that will need to be proven, but a trial could unearth of a lot ofthings 26 years after the genocide.’’ Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.
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