Organizations representing Survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi yesterday welcomed the release of a recent report on former President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane crash, saying that it emphasizes what had been known all along.

"We received the news about this report with great joy because finally, a research that has been carried out among key witnesses on the details of this plane crash. We have been aware it was not possible for the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) forces to bring down the plane considering that they were not in control of this area,” Assumpta Umurungi, Executive Secretary of Avega Agahozo said.

"The RPA were based at the Parliament buildings when the crash occurred, so the findings of the research have coincided with what we already knew,” Umurungi told The New Times.

Theodore Simburudari, president of Ibuka, an umbrella organization of Genocide survivors’ organisations, also concurred citing that the report clears the air on the fact that the outbreak of the Genocide was not a result of Habyarimana’s death, but rather a well planned deliberate and systematic move to eliminate the Tutsi.

Meanwhile the president of a Paris-based organization working to bring to book all Genocide fugitives living in France and elsewhere in Europe, Alain Gauthier, said that this report changes nothing regarding the organisation’s struggle against the alleged Genocide fugitives in France.

"Some questions however remain unanswered. Shouldn’t this report shed some light on what was the role of other foreign powers?” he questioned.

"The Genocide took place. We have never seen the attack against Habyarimana as the trigger for the Genocide. What matters to us today, is justice,” Gauthier said in a communication to The New Times.

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