Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
8 May 2008
The Special Representative of Rwandan government to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Aloys Mutabingwa, has welcomed seizure in Nairobi, Kenya of a property belonging to Felicien Kabuga, alleged financier of the 1994 genocide, but considered the initiative as insufficient.
The High Court of Kenya ordered Tuesday seizure of a spacious house upmarket Kilimani area located along Nairobi's Lenana Road , belonging to Kabuga, wanted for several years by the ICTR.
The Kenyan High Court's orders were issued after prosecutor Keriako Tobiko told it that proceeds from the estate helped the fugitive to evade capture. He said that the move is one of the policies put forward to make it hard for the renegade businessman to operate.
"The impasse has lasted too long; that is why we welcome this initiative. But, only the arrest of this man will put an end to this impasse ", Mutabingwa told the Hirondelle Agency.
The same concern was expressed Tuesday by the ICTR spokesperson, Roland Amoussouga.
"It is good news but additional efforts must be made (by Kenya) to ensure his arrest", remarked Amoussouga.
Timothy Gallimore, spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), declined any comment at this moment.
At the end of September 2006, the ICTR prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow, had pressured Kenya to arrest Kabuga. The following month, the Kenyan police had renewed its calls for his arrest, referring him as an "extremely dangerous fugitive".
Accused of having ordered the machetes that were used in the 1994 massacres, Kabuga is the ICTR's most wanted person. He had initially taken refuge in Switzerland before escaping to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then to Kenya; where he has escaped at least three attempts to arrest him.
He is suspected of having received protection from the former Kenyan president, Daniel Arap Moi. Kabuga's son-in-law, Augustin Ngirabatware, the former minister of planning, was arrested in September 2007 in Germany, where he is still being held while waiting his transfer to the Arusha-based ICTR.
An influential member of the then Rwandan presidential party, National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), Kabuga was also a related to the former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose assassination on 6 April 1994 sparked the genocide.
In addition to Kabuga, 12 other persons accused by the ICTR are still at large. The UN Security Council has asked the tribunal to finish all its first instance trials by end of the year.
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