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France Convicts Rwandan Ex-Officer of Genocide

Pascal Simbikangwa, a former intelligence officer, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — By his account, Pascal Simbikangwa did not see a single dead body. While thousands of members of the Tutsi ethnic group were slaughtered in the streets of Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in 1994, Mr. Simbikangwa, a former intelligence officer who uses a wheelchair, testified that he rarely left home.

When he did, he said, he was unable to see the bodies on the ground because he traveled in the back seat of a white Toyota Land Cruiser and because of his disability put a pillow behind his back to be able to “stretch out a little.”

“I don’t say that there weren’t any dead people,” Mr. Simbikangwa, 54, said during his trial here on charges of genocide and complicity in crimes against humanity. “But me, I haven’t seen them.”

On Friday, a French judge decided differently, sentencing Mr. Simbikangwa to 25 years in prison. Under international law, a country can claim criminal jurisdiction over a person who committed genocide regardless of where it was committed.

Mr. Simbikangwa, a Hutu, the ethnic majority that dominated the government at the time of the massacres, is the first Rwandan fugitive accused of genocide to be convicted in France. While other European countries, including Belgium, Sweden and Norway, convicted Rwandan fugitives accused of genocide in the past decade, Mr. Simbikangwa’s conviction will open the way to more than 20 prosecutions of former officials who fled Rwanda after Tutsi forces seized control of the country in the wake of the mass killings.

The case has also had a particular resonance in France, which has been widely criticized for doing little to prevent the mass killings in 1994 and for providing weapons and military training to the Hutu-led government that carried out them out.

The verdict on Friday was handed down after a six-week trial. Prosecutors questioned about 20 psychoanalysts, historians, journalists and former United Nations employees, and heard 53 witnesses, some of whom came from Rwanda to testify against Mr. Simbikangwa, nicknamed “the captain on wheels.”

Sought under an international arrest warrant since 2008, Mr. Simbikangwa was accused of distributing weapons to members of the Interahamwe militia who carried out the massacres and encouraging them to kill the Tutsi. He was arrested in 2009 on the island of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, where he had been hiding.

“There is a feeling of unreality in this trial,” said Emmanuel Daoud, who represented the International Federation for Human Rights, one of the five plaintiffs, which helped bring the case against Mr. Simbikangwa. “How do we let into a courtroom 800,000 dead people without a face, without a grave?”

Mr. Simbikangwa, a cousin of President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda — whose death in a plane crash touched off the genocide — was said to have had close ties with death squads as well as with the Akazu, a secret and elite Hutu corps within Mr. Habyarimana’s inner circle. He was also a shareholder of the Radio des Milles Collines, which spread fierce anti-Tutsi propaganda across the country before and during the slaughter.

Many French lawyers have emphasized the difficulty of prosecuting a case involving events that took place 20 years ago and 3,800 miles from France. Many Rwandan witnesses at the trial had trouble recounting what they saw between April and July 1994, when 800,000 people were killed. Some witnesses said they feared reprisals in their country.

Still, many witnesses provided chilling accounts of their encounters with Mr. Simbikangwa.

“On April 7 in the afternoon, Pascal Simbikangwa came to a meeting in Kibihekane where an attack was prepared,” said Théoneste Habarugira, a former member of the Interahamwe who spent seven years in prison. “He said that we had to kill the Tutsi.” Mr. Habarugira and other witnesses described Mr. Simbikangwa as an influential officer who supervised several roadblocks.

Valérie Bemeriki, one of the most prominent voices on Radio des Milles Collines, said Mr. Simbikangwa “had organized the genocide.” She testified by video from a prison in Kigali, where she is serving a life term.

Other witnesses defended him, emphasizing his ability to protect people he knew even as he was ordering the deaths of their fellow tribesmen. Former Tutsi neighbors of Mr. Simbikangwa described taking refuge at his house. “Pascal had a right over life and death,” said Isaie Harindintwari, who lived opposite Mr. Simbikangwa in Kigali. “I was untouchable because I was his Tutsi.”

Mr. Simbikangwa denied all the charges against him, arguing that he was then a second-rate official in the presidential intelligence service who believed that the threat did not come from the Tutsis but from the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel group.

At one point during his trial, Mr. Simbikangwa, whose mother and wife were Tutsi, denounced what he called the calumny and defamation directed at him.

“Telling moribund, absurd, negative things against the people I have protected seems to go against the honor of a military man, against my notion of how one treats a human being, and against the attachment I had for my mother, and the mother of my daughter,” Mr. Simbikangwa said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: France Convicts Rwandan of Genocide. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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