PARIS, France
A Paris appeals court on Wednesday ordered the reopening of an inquiry into the French army's alleged failure to intervene in a massacre during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, sources told AFP, after investigators last year closed the case.
Associations and survivors of
the killings of Tutsis in the Bisesero hills in western Rwanda have long accused
France's Turquoise mission and the government of "complicity in
genocide", saying the troops knowingly failed to protect victims for three
days.
Hundreds of Tutsis were killed
in the area between June 27 and 30, 1994.
Investigating magistrates
dropped the 17-year case in September, saying there was no evidence that the
French army was involved in atrocities committed in refugee camps, or that it
helped the perpetrators or deliberately held off from preventing the killings.
"Following a challenge
from the plaintiffs, the appeals court has now ordered investigators at Paris'
crimes against humanity division to reopen their probe after finding procedural
mistakes," a source familiar with the case told AFP.
Specifically, they had failed
to warn the case would be closed just weeks after allowing new documents -- a
summary of historian Vincent Duclert's report into the Bisesero incident -- to
be taken into evidence.
"We're again headed for
months or even years of legal battles to try to secure the only thing that
counts in our eyes: the end of the impunity military and political leaders have
benefited from in this case," said Patrick Baudouin, president of the
Human Rights League, one of the plaintiffs.
Fierce controversy remains
around France's UN-mandated Turquoise mission to Rwanda, which was supposed to
halt the genocide.
More than 800,000 people were
killed between April and July 1994 according to UN figures, most of them from
the Tutsi minority.
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