The Helsingen Sanomat said Thursday that investigators claim the unidentified suspect planned and implemented the slaughter of up to 25,000 people in the south Rwandan municipality of Nyakizu.

The suspect was arrested in April 2007 in relation to the genocidal acts but has maintained his innocence in the matter.

“The police have heard various assessments on how many deaths he might have been involved in. The estimates vary from several thousand to as many as 25,000,” NBI official Thomas Elfgren told Helsingen Sanomat.

The NBI  investigation into the 100-day genocide at the hands of extremist Hutu tribesmen is being aided by Rwandan authorities, the Helsingen Sanomat said. The lengthy genocide is said to have resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus.

The Finnish newspaper said the suspect was once a Rwandan Baptist Church official who may have had ties to former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana.

Des Forges, 66, was a passenger on a Continental Airlines commuter plane that crashed Thursday night as it approached the Buffalo Niagara Airport. Des Forges, who lived Buffalo with her husband, a professor at the University of Buffalo, was returning from a trip to Europe, the group said.

A graduate of Radcliffe College, Des Forges wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Yale on Rwanda. She began working for Human Rights Watch as a volunteer and Kenneth Roth, the executive director, said he had to force her to take a salary.

“She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist — principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people,” Roth said.

Des Forges testified at trials on the 1994 genocide. But she also exposed abuses by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, now the government, and was banned from the country in 2008.

She received a MacArthur Award in 1999, the same year she wrote an award-winning report on Rwanda, “Leave None to Tell the Story.”

Rwanda’s government is to reveal details of a report containing allegations of French involvement in the country’s 1994 genocide.

The report is expected to contain the names of those alleged to be implicated and the accusations against them.

Some 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days in the 1994 massacre.

Earlier this year France’s foreign minister denied French responsibility in connection with the genocide, but said political errors had been made.

Testimonies

The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in the capital, Kigali, says a commission set up by the government took nearly two years investigating France’s alleged role in the genocide.

It heard testimonies from genocide survivors, researchers, writers and reporters.

The 500-page document was presented to the government last November, but has not yet been made public.

Last week, President Paul Kagame told a press conference in Kigali that Rwanda had strong evidence implicating France’s role.

In the past his government has repeatedly accused France of arming and training the Hutu extremists who perpetrated the genocide, and of dragging its feet in co-operating with the investigations that followed the massacres.

The two countries have had a frosty relationship since 2006 when a French judge implicated President Paul Kagame in the downing in 1994 of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane, which triggered the killings.

President Kagame has always denied the charges and says Mr Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who blamed the incident on his Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide.

Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in the genocide.

It said the US embassy in Kinshasa will in the next few weeks work with the UN mission and others in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to distribute posters, matchbooks and other items to solicit information.

“Because many of the fugitives are believed to be living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this rewards for justice program will be focused there,” said Clint Williamson, ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues.

He said up to five million dollars will be given to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of any of the 13 men indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), who remain fugitives.

They were charged with perpetrating, financing and providing support for the 1994 genocide in which up to one million people were killed.

The program dating back to the late 1990s lapsed in the last year and a half as information dried up, but the State Department revived it as “there is some urgency in trying to resolve the issue of the fugitives,” Williamson said.

“The impunity of these men 14 years after the crimes were committed and their continuing their presence in the region represents a threat to stability and reconciliation,” Williamson told reporters.

One of the accused, Felicien Kabuga, is believed to be in Kenya, though “he has links to people in the Congo,” Williamson said. “We’re open to expanding this program again in Kenya if we think it’s useful.”

The others on the list are Augustin Bizimana, Idelphonse Nizeyimana, Protais Mpiranya, Gregoire Ndahimana, Fulgence Kayishema, Bernard Munyagishari, Pheneas Munyarugarama, Aloys Ndimbati, Ladislas Ntaganzwa, Charles Ryandikayo, Charles Sikubwabo, and Jean Bosco Uwinkindi.

Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary for African affairs, said no money has been awarded to anyone in the past because governments rather than individuals gave tips that led to the arrests of at least three accused of war crimes.

The genocide in Rwanda ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) routed the FAR (the French acronym for the Armed Forces of Rwanda) in July of that year.

The Kenyan Attorney , Mr. Keriako Tobiko, requested Tuesday the High Court of Kenya to temporarily put under sequestration the rents of the “Spanish Villa” property, located in Nairobi, which have been up to now deposited into an account in Belgium, that is in the name of the wife of Mr Kabuga, Josephine Mukazitoni.

“It is good news but additional efforts must be deployed (by Kenya) to ensure his arrest”, reacted the spokesperson of the ICTR, Roland Amoussouga. “Our absolute priority is obviously the arrest of Kabuga. Any additional action by Kenyan authorities in the direction will be highly appreciated”, added Amoussouga. He said that Mr Kabuga is the subject of a particular resolution from the Security Council.

At the end of September 2006, the Prosecutor of ICTR), Hassan Bubacar Jallow, had pressed Kenya to arrest Mr Kabuga, who has been hiding in the East African country and conducting business activities. He said intelligence reports from their tracking team had reportedly pointed that Kabuga was in Kenya.The following month, the Kenyan police had renewed its calls for his arrest, presenting him as an “extremely dangerous fugitive”.

Accused of having ordered machetes which were used in the massacres of 1994, Kabuga is the ICTR’s most wanted suspect.

He had initially taken refuge in Switzerland before escaping to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then to Kenya; where he escaped at least three from attempts to arrest him.

He is suspected of having received protection on behalf of the former Kenyan President, Daniel Arap Moi. Kabuga’s son-in-law, Augustin Ngirabatware, former minister of planning, was arrested in Germany in September 2007. The indictment was issued by the ICTR; but the tribunal has not obtained his transfer to Arusha yet.

A member of the Rwandan presidential party of the time, the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), Mr. Kabuga was also a family relative of the former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, whose assassination on 6 April 1994 sparked the genocide.

Besides Kabuga, 12 others persons accused by the ICTR are still at large as the Security Council has requested the tribunal to finish this year the first instance trials.