Members of the French armed forces deployed in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide were set on Monday to avoid any trial after prosecutors recommended that judges drop a case accusing them of complicity in crimes against humanity over their inaction in a massacre.
Survivors of the June 1994 slaughter in the hills of Bisesero in western Rwanda had accused French troops of deliberately abandoning them to Hutu extremists, who murdered hundreds of people in the area within days.
The call to drop the 15-year-old case followed a major report in March examining allegations about France’s role in the genocide, which found that Paris had been “blind” to preparations but not complicit in the killings.
The Paris prosecutors concluded that the investigation “did not make it possible to establish that the French forces could have been guilty of the crimes of complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity”.
The inquiry did not confirm that there had been any “help or assistance from the French military forces during the carrying out of the atrocities,” said chief Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz.
Nor, he added, did it establish that the French forces “refrained from intervening in the face of genocide or crimes against humanity due to a prior agreement”.
Credit: aljazeera.com
The post French troops to avoid trial over Rwanda massacre appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
Read Full Story
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS