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| Rwandan President Paul Kagame |
The court ruled Rwandan President Paul Kagame's diplomatic immunity prevents their lawsuit from going forward. From Courthouse News Service, about pro-free-market Rwandan president: "Rwandan President Paul Kagame cannot be sued on U.S. soil for allegedly masterminding the 1994 assassinations of two African leaders, the 10th Circuit ruled.
The widows of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi president Cyprien Ntarymira said in a federal complaint that Kagame gave the order to shoot down a plane carrying their husbands.
The murder of the Hutu leaders sparked a massacre of the minority Tutsis, fueling the Rwandan genocide, 'which spread violence across East Central Africa and cost upwards of one million innocent victims their lives,' the court explained."
The article continues: "Though some believe that Hutu Power extremists, opposed to a peace accord with the rebels, downed the plane, Habyarimana and Ntarymira's widows belong to a group that thinks the Kagame's Tutsi-manned Rwandan Patriotic Front fired down the plane.
The widows say that Kagame perpetrated the attack because it 'could only bring about bloody reprisals against the Tutsi community, and which offered him a veneer of legitimacy for his renewal of hostilities and his seizing of state power in Rwanda by criminally violent means.'"
