THE HAGUE, May 16 (Reuters) – Lucien Kabuga, a suspect in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, has died in custody, a U.N. court said on Saturday. He was 93.
Kabuga was arrested in France in 2020 after more than two decades on the run and extradited to The Hague. He was later ruled unfit to stand trial because of dementia and was also deemed too ill to return to Rwanda.
With no country willing to accept him, Kabuga remained in the U.N. detention centre in The Hague. The court said it had ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of his death.
The former businessman and radio station owner was among the last fugitives sought over the genocide, in which Hutu extremists killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days.
Prosecutors accused Kabuga of promoting hate speech through his broadcaster Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines and of helping arm ethnic Hutu militias.
The court that announced his death, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, oversees remaining cases from the former U.N. tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
(Reporting by Toby Sterling. Editing by Mark Potter)
Copyright 2026 Thomson Reuters.
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