Tribunal orders release of internal UN memo

The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Thursday ordered the release of a document written by a former UN employee concerning the circumstances surrounding the 6 April 1994 plane crash in which the former presidents of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed. An ICTR statement said that the three-page internal memorandum was written in 1997 by Michael Hourigan, a former member of one of the investigative teams of the office of the prosecutor for the Tribunal. It said that Hourigan wrote the memo "on his own initiative", while on a short-term contract with the Office of Internal Oversight Services at the UN headquarters in New York. The memo was found in a file at the headquarters earlier this year and transmitted to the Tribunal, whose president then placed the document under seal.