The UN war crimes court has ruled declared 88-year-old Félicien Kabuga, who is accused of being a major financier of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, unfit to stand trial
Kabuga’s lawyers had argued that he suffered from dementia. He was arrested in Paris in 2020 after evading capture for 26 years, reportedly moving around East Africa.
In their ruling, judges at a UN war crimes court in The Hague said Kabuga was “unfit to participate meaningfully in his trial and is very unlikely to regain fitness in the future”.
The judges proposed an alternative legal procedure that “resembles a trial as closely as possible, but without the possibility of a conviction”.
He is alleged to have financed ethnic Hutu militias who slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. He has denied the charges.
This is the first time a court has given such a ruling in a decades-long campaign to bring Rwandan genocide suspects to justice.
The court had paused his trial in March to allow for his health to be assessed. According to court documents, he is 88, although there is some dispute about his precise age.
It is alleged that Kabuga used his large fortune, made in the 1970s tea trade, to buy weapons used to arm the Hutu death squads.
The wealthy businessman is also accused of using his radio station to urge Hutus to kill Tutsis, fueling the genocide by broadcasting inflammatory hate speech.
French investigators tracked him down to an apartment in Paris where he had been living under a false identity.
The United States had offered a reward of 5 million dollars for information leading to his arrest.
