One of the world’s most wanted men on Wednesday lost his appeal against being handed over to an international court to be tried for his alleged role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The Court of Cassation in Paris upheld an order from a lower court that Felicien Kabuga be handed over to a UN tribunal on charges including genocide, persecution and extermination.
He was also accused of financing the genocide.
Kabuga was arrested from his home outside Paris after 26 years on the run. He has lived under a false name throughout the time. He outwitted prosecutors of the Rwandan genocide tribunal for more than two-and-a-half decades by using 28 aliases and powerful connections across two continents to evade capture.
The 84-year-old had been on the run for so long that the international tribunal set up to bring to justice those responsible for the 1994 genocide had ceased to work.
Kabuga, born in 1933 or 1935, was a wealthy businessman at the time of the atrocities in which more than 800,000 people were killed.
An indictment from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) alleged that he chaired a notorious radio station that helped orchestrate the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic minority.
He is also accused of agreeing with others to create and fund a genocidal militia in the capital Kigali, and establishing a fund to finance the killings.
Rwandan prosecutors have said in the past that financial documents found in Kigali after the genocide indicated that he used his companies to import vast quantities of machetes from China which were used to slaughter victims.
No further appeal against his extradition is possible in the French legal system, although his lawyers could take a case to the European Court of Human Rights.
He denies all the charges, describing the accusations as “lies” during a court appearance in May.
