Félicien Kabuga, accused of bankrolling the Rwandan genocide, died on Thursday in a hospital in The Hague while in custody, a U.N. court said.
Kabuga, whose exact birthday is not known but was over 90, was suffering from dementia and has been stranded in legal limbo since 2023 when judges ruled that he was not fit to stand trial.
He was one of the last fugitives charged in connection with the 1994 genocide, accused of encouraging and financing the mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. After years of evading international efforts to track him down, Kabuga was arrested near Paris in May 2020.
In a statement, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which deals with remaining cases from the now-closed U.N. tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkan wars, said it would “conduct an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Kabuga while in custody.”
His trial began nearly three decades after the 100-day massacre left some 800,000 dead. He pleaded not guilty to charges including genocide and incitement to commit genocide.
At the opening of his trial, prosecution lawyer Rashid Rashid described Kabuga as an enthusiastic supporter of the Tutsi slaughter who armed, trained and encouraged murderous Hutu militias known as Interahamwe.
The mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority was triggered on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down and crashed in the capital, Kigali, killing the leader who, like the majority of Rwandans, was an ethnic Hutu. Kabuga’s daughter was married to Habyarimana’s son.
The Tutsi minority was blamed for downing the plane. Bands of Hutu extremists began slaughtering Tutsis and their perceived supporters, with help from the army, police, and militias.
Rashid described Kabuga as a wealthy businessman with close links to the Hutu political elite who incited genocide through the RTLM broadcaster he helped fund and establish. In some cases, it provided locations of Tutsis so they could be hunted down and killed, he said.
Yolande Mukakasana, a genocide survivor and writer who lost her entire family in the genocide, told The Associated Press when the trial opened that the case had come too late for many survivors who have died since the slaughter.
“Men and women of Kabuga’s age were found in bed and murdered. Shame (upon) his sympathizers who cite his old age as a reason not to (stand) trial,” she said.
Kabuga had remained at a United Nations detention center after the trial was halted because authorities failed to find a country willing to take him in. Kabuga did not want to return to Rwanda — which offered to take him — out of fear he would be mistreated.
“A man whom international judges had themselves recognised as unfit to stand trial died in prison, although his continued deprivation of liberty no longer served any judicial purpose,” Kabuga’s lawyer, Emmanuel Altit, said in a statement.
