French
police seized the man regarded as the intellectual and financial mastermind behind the Rwandan genocide on Saturday, ending a transcontinental 26-year manhunt for “the Eichmann of Africa”. Félicien Kabuga, Africa’s most wanted fugitive, was arrested in the northern outskirts of
Paris after a dawn raid on his flat in the commune of Asnières-sur-Seine. Officers said the 84 year-old had been living there under an assumed identity. French authorities released few details about the operation, beyond hailing the capture of “one of the world’s most wanted fugitives”. It is believed that a series of simultaneous raids were carried out on addresses across
France, some linked to Kabuga’s children, to ensure that he did not escape. Those familiar with the investigation suggested that the operation, at least in terms of the painstaking intelligence work involved, had echoes of the Mossad mission to seize the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from Buenos Aires in 1960. The
British security services played an “essential” role in the operation that led to Kabuga’s capture, according to
United Nations prosecutors. So, too, did investigators in the
United States, which has long had a $5 million (£4.1m) bounty on his head,
Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Kabuga will not be sedated and spirited away to Rwanda in the way Eichmann was smuggled into Israel, where he was tried and hanged for his role as a primary architect of the Final Solution. Instead he will eventually be handed over to a United Nations tribunal to answer longstanding charges of crimes against humanity.