Tribunal denies French judge plane crash report

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has denied a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a confidential report on the 6 April 1994 plane crash which killed Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, the independent Hirondelle news agency reported on Wednesday. “As much as the judges wanted to be of assistance, they decided that there was no rule or other avenue under which they could hand over the report,” Hirondelle quoted ICTR spokesman Kingsley Moghalu as saying. He said that although Trial Chambers One and Three of the ICTR had ruled to disclose the report to the defence teams of three genocide suspects, their decisions related only to those specific cases. The suspects concerned are former Rwandan mayor Ignace Bagalishema, and former military leaders Gratien Kabiligi and Aloys Ntabakuze.

The memorandum was written in 1997 by an Australian investigator who was working for the ICTR prosecution. The Tribunal says he wrote it “on his own initiative” after he had left and was working for the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) in New York. The document’s existence became known after it was leaked to a Canadian newspaper, the ‘National Post’, earlier this year. It was sent to the ICTR whose president put it under seal.