“Karenzi Karake, 54, a Rwandan national appeared before Westminster Magistrates’ Court… after being arrested on a European Arrest Warrant on behalf of the authorities in Spain, where he is wanted in connection with war crimes against civilians”, the police said in an emailed statement.
Karenzi Karake was held by British police at Heathrow Airport on Saturday in relation to a Spanish court’s 2008 indictment for war crimes.
He is also accused of ordering the killing of three medics from the NGO Médicos del Mundo.
Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s foreign minister, said the arrest was an outrage, adding: “Western solidarity in demeaning Africans is unacceptable”.
A 2008 diplomatic cable sent from the United States embassy in Kigali and released by WikiLeaks dismissed the Spanish indictments as “outrageous and inaccurate”. He was remanded in custody and will reappear in court on Thursday.
“There’s a sloppiness I think in much of the investigation that underpins this and even very critical human rights groups, that have tended not to be very friendly to Rwanda in the past, have raised questions about the quality of the Spanish arrest warrants”. The court couldn’t say when a judge was likely to rule on the request.
The Rwandan foreign minister accused Spanish non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which she said were behind the arrest warrant, of backing the FDLR.
The massacre was halted by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the then rebel force led by Paul Kagame, who is now president.
Phillip Gourevitch, a leading writer on Rwanda, told Newsnight that Gen Karake’s arrest was the equivalent of the head of the UK’s MI6 or the US’s CIA being arrested.
In 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda targeted minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a three-month killing spree that left an estimated 800,000 people dead.
Spain’s ability to pursue Karake may be hobbled by a law passed by the ruling conservative government past year that severely limits judges’ ability to prosecute crimes that occur outside Spain under a system known as universal justice.
Four other Spaniards - Joaquim Valmajó, Servando García, Fernando de la Fuente and Isidro Uzkudun, all priests - were tortured and murdered by RPF members.
But Human Rights Watch reported that in their drive for military victory and to control the population, the RPF killed thousands, including government troops, members of the militia and some civilians in numerous executions and massacres.
Like many senior RPF players, Karake later fell out of favour with Kagame and in April 2010 was put under house arrest for “misbehaviour”.
