Defence lawyers of Rwandan military officers disappointed

• Bruguiere’s arrest warrants a political fabrication Lawyers defending Rwandan military officials against French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere’s arrest warrants told journalists in Brussels last Thursday that they were disappointed by France’s justice system over silence and failure to handle their clients’ case. Belgian lawyer Bernard Mangain and French lawyer Lef Forster defend retired General Samuel Kanyemera (a.k.a Sam Kaka), Lt. Colonels Rose Kabuye and Jacob Tumwiine against indictments and arrest warrants issued by Bruguiere in 2006. The three are among nine top Rwandan military officers implicated by the French judge in his report on the crash of the plane that killed Rwanda’s former President, Juvenal Habyarimana. Mangain and Lef Forster distributed a file of 21 pages, comprising mainly letters they wrote to French justice institutions, to journalists. The file was some of the evidence they exhibited to show how the French justice system has been blocking them in their bid for fairness to their Rwandan clients. “We are banging the door of an institution in which we are refused to enter,” said Maitre Bernard Mangain, explaining that he and his colleague were denied access to their clients’ indictment dossiers by the France’s judiciary. The lawyers said that Bruguiere’s investigation was biased mainly because it didn’t hear from people living in Rwanda. They requested the French justice system to remove the arrest warrants issued against their clients and let the accused appear in court. “What we ask is that the arrest warrants against our clients be removed but it does not mean that they can’t appear in court. What is amazing is that asking for these warrants to be removed is one way of giving the accused a chance to appear in court,”BBC’s evening Kinyarwanda Programme quoted Maitre Lef Forster as saying. Despite having been refused to read their clients’ dossiers, Lef Forster said that the defense lawyers would complete their investigations by the end of this year. He, however, said that one should not expect the trials to start before the end of one more year. Meanwhile Rwanda’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Tharcisse Karugarama, has said that there are no reasons why Bruguiere’s arrest warrants shouldn’t be removed, saying they are ‘valueless’. “They [warrants] shouldn’t have value because they are a political fabrication,” he told The New Times in a telephone interview on Friday. A defense case similar to that of Rose Kabuye and her colleagues was filed in Belgium by the country’s army Generals Jacques Nziza and Charles Kayonga. In a report issued two years ago, Bruguiere said that there was evidence that Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and his military staff planned the operation to shoot down Habyarimanas plane. Rwanda refuted the allegations saying that the report was forged by France in order to destabilize the government in Kigali and cover-up its alleged role in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. The plane crash triggered a 100-day Genocide against Tutsis in which more than a million people were brutally massacred. Ends

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Defence lawyers of Rwandan military officers disappointed