Rwandan Leader Accuses France of Aiding Genocide

The Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, yesterday accused a French judge of "inexcusable arrogance" in issuing arrest warrants for nine of his close associates and claiming he too should be prosecuted by an international criminal court.

Mr Kagame, on his first visit to the UK as president, launched into the most lengthy and explicit criticism of France since the row began last month, and claimed that the French government had been directly complicit in the 1994 genocide that claimed 800,000 lives.

The president, who met Tony Blair on Tuesday and the Queen yesterday, said: "It's France that supported the genocidal forces, that trained them, that armed them, that participated in fighting against the forces that were trying to stop the genocide."

He told the BBC: "France did not at any one time attempt to stop the genocide. On the contrary, they actually participated in the period leading to that genocide in supporting the government of Rwanda."

Relations between the French government and Mr Kagame have long been strained and an uneasy pact has existed between them not to delve too deeply into Paris's role in events. But that pact ended last month when a French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, issued the arrest warrants and accused Mr Kagame of being involved in the 1994 assassination of the then president Juvénal Habyarimana, the incident generally credited with sparking the genocide. As a result of the warrants, Rwanda broke off ties with France.

Mr Kagame, who has been helping to rebuild Rwanda and is supported by the British government, offered a detailed rebuttal of the French charges on Tuesday night at the London-based thinktank Chatham House and again on the BBC yesterday morning.

The French embassy said yesterday that the country's parliament had conducted an inquiry into the events of 1994 and concluded in 1998 that France had tried to prevent the tragedy.