Félicien Kabuga, one of the last major fugitives indicted for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, died Thursday in a hospital in The Hague while in the custody of a United Nations tribunal, the court said. Kabuga, who was in his 90s and suffering from dementia, had been stranded in legal limbo since 2023 when judges ruled he was unfit to stand trial on charges of genocide, incitement to commit genocide, and other crimes.
Prosecutors described Kabuga as a wealthy businessman with close ties to Rwanda’s Hutu political elite who helped finance and arm the Interahamwe militias. At the opening of his trial, prosecution lawyer Rashid Rashid said Kabuga provided money and weapons to the Hutu extremist groups that led the slaughter, and helped establish the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a broadcaster that incited violence and sometimes broadcast the locations of Tutsis so they could be hunted down.
The genocide was triggered on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was shot down and crashed in Kigali. Kabuga’s daughter was married to Habyarimana’s son. Hutu extremists blamed Tutsis for the attack, and within hours bands of militias, with the support of the army and police, began systematically killing Tutsis and perceived supporters. An estimated 800,000 people were killed over 100 days.
Kabuga evaded international efforts to capture him for decades, reportedly moving across multiple countries before being arrested near Paris in May 2020.
His trial opened nearly 30 years after the genocide, but was suspended indefinitely in 2023 when a panel of U.N. judges determined he had advanced dementia and was unfit to participate in court proceedings. The ruling left Kabuga in detention even though no trial could proceed, because no country agreed to accept him; he reportedly feared mistreatment if returned to Rwanda.
Genocide survivor Yolande Mukakasana, who lost her entire family, told the Associated Press when the trial opened that the case had come too late for many survivors. “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’s lawyer, Emmanuel Altit, criticized the continued detention, saying in a statement: “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.”
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the U.N. body that handles remaining cases from the now-closed Rwandan and Balkan war tribunals, said it would conduct an inquiry into the circumstances of Kabuga’s death while in custody.