The French judge who has caused a storm by calling the French prosecutor'soffice to cause indictment for Rwandese president Paul Kagame now wants Uganda's president also indicted.

According to highly placed sources in the Rwanda intelligence, the French judge Jean Louis Bruguiere is now working to indict President Yoweri Museveni.

They allege that Museveni, who was the President of Uganda at the time, should take some blame for the eventual downing of the plane that killed former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and as a result caused the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

According to the information reaching us, the judge, working in collaboration with Uganda's dissidents, wants Museveni indicted together with Generals David Tinyefuza and Salim Saleh. According to Bruguiere, the missiles that hit Habyarimana' s plane were procured from Russia under an inter-state agreement. While in Uganda, the missiles ended up in the hands of the rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).

He further alleges that those who shot down Habyarimana were trained in Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria in Masaka district before being taken to Muvumba, then RPF rebel headquarters by commander James Kabarebe, now a general in the Rwandan army.

Kabarebe is believed to be the man who gave this squad of shooters the last instructions before they left Murindi area to Kigali. The hit squad first camped in the parliamentary building where the RPA had forces under the command of Gen. Charles Kayonga before moving to a place called Masaka (in Rwanda, not Uganda), which borders Kanombe Airport to execute their final mission.

Some Ugandan dissidents working in collaboration with some Makerere University lecturers have also lined the atrocities committed by the UPDF in DR Congo as more evidence to indict Museveni. They cite the Kisangani wars between the Rwandan and Ugandan forces where thousands of innocent Congolese citizens perished in cold blood. Besides, they also allege that both the Rwandan and Ugandan generals plundered the Congolese natural resources.

Elements working on this agenda highlight the tangible evidence provided by Judge Bruguière. He bases his defence speech on the fact that he was able to authenticate the origin and trail of the missiles used to shoot down President Habyarimana' s plane on April 6, 1994.

In his view, RPF leader Paul Kagame, while preparing the shooting of the plane, could not ignore that this action would trigger mass reprisals killings.

The Evidence:

Because the real tangible evidence - the missile launcher tubes - that would have helped the judge in tracking the origin and trail of the missiles have disappeared in Zaire. Bruguière bases his tracking on an identification report of the missile launcher tubes and on pictures of the missile launchers taken by the Rwandese Armed Forces in April, 1994.

Bruguière explains that the identification numbers of the missiles were obtained from the two missile launcher tubes allegedly found unattended at the scene of the shooting. Some peasants allegedly found the two unattended tubes in the bush in the area of Masaka, near Kanombe Airport, and brought them to the Rwandese Armed Forces who recorded their identification numbers.

The judge goes on to state that on April 24 and 25, 1994, Lt-Engineer Augustin Munyaneza had examined the two tubes and drafted a handwritten report stating the identification numbers of the missile launchers as 04-87-04814 and 04-87-04835. A photocopy of this one-page report was attached as an addendum to the French Parliamentarian Fact-finding Mission Report on the role of France between 1990 and 1994.

Pictures of the missile launchers were taken and on the pictures, the reference number of one of the missile launchers was clearly legible and indeed corresponds to one of the two numbers stated above. Copies of the pictures were also attached to the fact-finding mission report.

Judge Bruguière succeeded in establishing that in May 1994, in Paris, the photos were handed over to General Huchon (who was at that time transferred to the French Cooperation Ministry) by Lt-Col. Ephrem Rwabalinda, accompanied by Col. Sébastien Ntahondara, the defence attaché to the Rwanda Embassy in Paris.

The pictures were then handed over by the Cooperation Ministry to the Military Intelligence Department (Direction du Renseignement Militaire - DRM).

Bruguière explains that as part of the implementation of a legal assistance request, the Moscow Military Prosecutor's Office established that the two missiles bearing reference 04-87-04814 and 04-87-04835 were made in the USSR and were part of an order of 40 SA 16IGLA missiles delivered to Uganda in execution of an inter-state contract.

According to Bruguière, in view of the Ugandan origin of the missiles and of the fact that for him, the armament of the RPF, including its anti-aircraft weapons, originated from the Uganda military arsenal. Therefore President Habyarimana' s plane was shot down by the RPF.

In his demonstration, Bruguière abundantly quotes the Fact-finding Mission Report which is his main source of information on the missiles, and merely had such information confirmed by witnesses, the majority of whom are RPF opponents or French servicemen.

The only new information as compared to the extracts from the Fact-finding Mission Report is the tracking of the origin of the missiles, including their Soviet origin and previous inclusion in the Uganda military arsenal.

However, the trail of missile launcher No. 04-87-04814 and No. 04-87-04835 was rejected by the French Parliamentarian Fact-finding Mission, which clearly showed that this was an attempted manipulation. The best way to proceed here is to replicate the findings of the review of the missile issue by the French Parliamentarian Fact-finding Mission.

To better understand these findings which mention Prof. Reyntjens, it is useful to know that the reference numbers of the two missile launchers mentioned by Filip Reyntjens in his book Rwanda, Trois jours qui ont fait basculer l'histoire are fully consistent with the numbers mentioned in the handwritten report by Lt-Engineer Augustin Munyaneza, a copy of which is attached as an annex to the Fact-finding Mission Report.