As the dawn broke on May 16, an elite French police team blew open the door to an apartment in a sleepy northwestern suburb of Paris where they found Felicien Kabuga, suspected of bankrolling the Rwandan Tutsi genocide in 1994.
The arrest marked the end of a 26-year manhunt for Kabuga, who used 28 aliases and relied on powerful links to evade justice in both Africa and Europe, investigators say. In the end, failing in his health, some of his 11 children supported him, but it was these same links that helped to uncover his whereabouts.
Interviews with 14 security officials and diplomats shed light on how Kabuga managed to live undetected for such a long time , despite having a $5 million bounty on his head and facing seven counts of genocide and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in killing 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
“It was a bombshell. Everyone had forgotten about him,” Alain Gauthier, who tracked Rwandan genocide suspects for 20 years with his Rwandan-born wife Dafroza said.
Investigators accuse Kabuga, 87, a onetime tycoon of tea and coffee, of financing, arming and inciting Hutu militias. They also say he has used a radio station that he co-founded in Rwanda, a landlocked country in the south of Africa, to fan ethnic hatred.
On May 27, Kabuga told a French court that the charges laid by an international tribunal against him were lies. “I have not killed any Tutsis. I was working with them,” he said.
Kabuga was lying in bed in the Asnieres-sur Seine flat, just a 25-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower when the police burst in. At first he feigned annoyance at an interpreter who spoke Kinyarwanda, an official Rwandan language. He answered in Kiswahili, a language commonly spoken in central Africa. He said that his name was Antoine Tounga and that he came from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But a scar from 2007 throat surgery on his neck, which was detailed in a red “wanted” notice from Interpol, gave him away. Two hours later a DNA test showed that Tounga really was Kabuga.
The octogenarian had undergone the throat operation in Germany and when he moved to France, where he is now considered to have lived for at least four years, it is still not clear.
“This was deeply embarrassing for us because he was here all this time under our noses. That reflects terribly on us,” said a French source close to the investigation.
Police said his son Alain Habumukiza, whose family name was on a letter box in the block’s foyer, rented out the third-floor apartment. When police arrived, another son, Donatien Nshimyumuremyi, was in the flat. He is based in Belgium but moved to Asnieres during the outbreak of the coronavirus, presumably to look after his father, investigators said.
Children can not be charged under French law for trying to prevent arrest of their parents.
Two neighbors thought Kabuga had spent three years living at Asnieres. Another has said as much as five. They described him as a discreet man who had become ever more housebound.
“He was always accompanied by a younger man or woman, probably his children,” said one of the neighbours, who declined to be named. “He seemed weak, tired and had mobility issues.”
Kabuga’s defense team’s court documents show that since 2016 he has made at least 10 visits to the Beaujon hospital in northern Paris, always using the alias Tounga.
On Jan. 25 of that year, he received a brain MRI scan, and subsequently had his stomach and colon scans. He underwent surgery twice in 2019, the documents show. He would be accompanied by one of his daughters to translate, said lawyer Kabuga.
On May 29, Kabuga’s family said in a statement to reporters that he had a colectomy last year and suffered from diabetes, hypertension and dementia.
After having taken control of Rwanda in July 1994 by Tutsi rebels backed by the Ugandan army, millions of Hutu fled and Kabuga originally went to Switzerland. There was no arrest warrant for him at the time, and he was permitted to withdraw money from a bank before heading to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a legal source said, having tracked his flight.
He had been charged in 1997 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Investigators believed he was living in Kenya and Interpol informed Kenyan police repeatedly of locations where he had been sighted, a source said in Europe, but there is no record that any action has been taken. The Kenyan government denied accusations by both the ICTR and Washington that the country was sheltering Kabuga.
Kabuga was nearly captured in 2003 after an associate, a Kenyan journalist named William Munuhe, attempted to cash in on the U.S. bounty by tipping U.S. agents off to the location of the fugitive. Yet before he had a chance to contact the waiting U.S. security team, Munuhe was found dead in his room, and the trail then went cold.
At the time Munuhe’s family was told by Kenyan police that he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. But his brother Mureithi Munuhe said he was assassinated to thwart operation led by the U.S. “His face had been disfigured by acid and I had to ask the mortuary attendants to push his tongue back so we could identify him using his teeth,” Mureithi said.
Officials at the U.S. embassy in Paris said they had no comment to make on the Kabuga situation.
Kabuga’s trace was taken up again in Germany in 2007, when his son-in-law, Augustin Ngirabatware, Rwanda’s minister of planning in 1994, was arrested near Frankfurt. A individual familiar with the case said Ngirabatware had harbored Kabuga, who is now serving a 30-year prison sentence for inciting genocide.
Lawyer Richard Gisagara, who represents Rwandan expatriates in France and has filed a judicial complaint to initiate an investigation into who aided Kabuga, believes that only close family knew of his whereabouts in recent years.
“They needed to keep it secret. The bounty on his head meant that if it went beyond that small family circle, there would have been a leak,” Gisagara said.
Since surviving on scraps of potential sightings for more than a decade in Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain, the U.N. In 2019, the Hague-based prosecutor Serge Brammertz changed tack and decided to concentrate on the children. Operation “955”, named after the U.N. Resolution was launched which produced ICTR. When much of Europe was crippled by the coronavirus lockout, it gave investigators time to concentrate on Kabuga ‘s case.
“The children who protected their father always led back to Asnieres-sur-Seine,” said Eric Emeraux, head of the French police’s Central Office for Combating Crimes Against Humanity.
One of the daughters often moved between Britain and Belgium, and also remained in Paris for periods. Her phone calls were routed to the area of Asnieres. So did his other offspring calls too.
Investigators also uncovered a 10,000-euro ($11,260) transfer by one of Kabuga ‘s daughters, Bernadette Uwamariya, to the Beaujon hospital in the summer of 2019.
“The 10,000 euros corresponded to a downpayment for the (colon) operation,” said a source aware of the transfer. A hospital bill for a further 65,000 euros remained unpaid, the source said. A second source said the patient is known as Antoine Tounga on documents.
AP-HP, the Paris hospital group that manages Beaujon, said it would not comment on the case.
The transfer was the last piece in the jigsaw for investigators, enabling them to match DNA samples from the Beaujon hospital with samples from Germany and to provide them with a copy of the Kabuga Congolese passport used.
DRC officials did not respond to requests for comment on how Kabuga held a legitimate Congolese passport. A French diplomatic source said that Kabuga was most likely undetected on a standard Schengen visa from the European Union. That could not be verified independently.
Kabuga is being held in a prison in Paris until being transferred to a U.N. Tribunals in Tanzania or The Hague. Rights advocates worry that he may once again try to escape justice.
“We can only regret that this arrest has come so late. Given his age and his health, we don’t know whether the tribunal will be able to complete his trial,” said Gauthier.