In early July, a Rwandan living in France was indicted in Paris, including for crimes against humanity, and remanded in custody. He is suspected of having participated in the genocide in 1994, a judicial source said on Wednesday, confirming information from the New Republic.
Madjaliwa Safari, 58 years old and who lives near Tours, “strongly contests all the facts with which he is charged”, reacted to AFP his lawyer Me Abed Bendjador, who expects from this “judicial investigation that it makes it possible to rebalance the contradictory, to explain one’s situation”.
Mr. Safari, who was not naturalized French, was indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity, and complicity of these two counts, according to the judicial source. He was remanded in custody on Friday.
At this stage, he was indicted for the period from April 6 to July 1994 and for acts committed in particular in the current southern province, in particular in the former prefectures of Gitarama and Butare, according to the same source.
He is said to have played a particular role at a barrier – a roadblock – called “Chez Premier”. Some witnesses describe his leadership role and his active participation in the arrests and executions of civilians on this barrier, according to the same source.
Rwanda had issued an international arrest warrant against him in 2017 and a judicial investigation was opened in Paris on November 19, 2019. The genocide in Rwanda killed more than 800,000 people, according to the UN, mainly Tutsis exterminated between April and July 1994.
Under the “universal jurisdiction” exercised, under certain conditions, by France to try the most serious crimes committed outside its soil, French justice has already sentenced several Rwandan nationals.
Among them, the former Rwandan gendarme Philippe Hategekimana, 66, naturalized French under the name of Philippe Manier, sentenced on June 28 in Paris to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity. He appealed his conviction.