'I have not killed any Tutsis': Alleged financier of Rwandan genocide denies involvement after decades on the run

The accused financier of the genocide of 800,000 men, women, and children denied he was responsible after being captured this month in France.

Felicien Kabuga, 84, appeared in French court on Wednesday, where he was denied bail. He was arrested in a Paris suburb 26 years after the brutal genocide and managed to evade capture for so long by using more than two dozen aliases, police said.

“All of this is lies. I have not killed any Tutsis. I was working with them,” Kabuga told the court. The remarks, done through a translator, were reportedly the first public comments Kabuga has made since the genocide.

Kabuga had been Rwanda’s most wanted fugitive at the time of his arrest and had a $5 million bounty on his head. The businessman was indicted in 1997 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on seven counts of genocide and other charges related to the violence.

In addition to allegedly paying members of the majority Hutu ethnic group to butcher Rwanda’s minority Tutsi ethnic group, he also founded the notorious Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines. The radio station broadcast messages of hate and ordered civilians to go out and kill their own neighbors.

Kabuga’s legal team is arguing that he should not be extradited out of France to face the genocide charges. The French court will make a decision on his extradition early next month but, in the meantime, has denied his request for bail.

“For international justice, Kabuga's arrest demonstrates that we can succeed when we have the international community's support,” said Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, after Kabuga’s May 16 arrest.