The six — some ranking Rwandan army officials — were charged last week over the killing of Juvenal Habyarimana, they said.
The assassination was widely seen as a trigger to Rwanda’s genocide, in which an estimated 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were massacred in 100 days of frenzied killing led by radical Hutus.
Investigating Judge Marc Trevidic visited the Burundi capital of Bujumbura from Dec. 5 to Dec. 15, when the six agreed to be placed under investigation, said Bernard Maingain and Lev Forster, who represent all of the men.
France is investigating the Rwanda case because the plane’s crew was French and died with Habyaramina, along with then-President of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira.
Among the six people in question are ranking Rwandan army officers, including James Kabarebe, who has been Rwanda’s defense minister since April, Charles Kayonga and Jackson Nkurunziza, the attorneys said.
The remaining three were identified as Jacob Tumwine, Sam Kaka and Franck Nziza.
In November 2006, a now-retired anti-terrorism magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, delivered nine arrest warrants against people close to Kagame, all suspected of participating to various degrees in the April 6, 1994, attack. The warrants triggered a break in diplomatic ties between France and Rwanda — re-established only in 2009 when President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Rwandan capital of Kigali last February.
Pre-genocide Hutu extremists and Tutsi rebels are both suspected of being behind the April 6, 1994 shooting of the Falcon 50 craft.
The French team suspect a commando unit of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels of infiltrating the Rwandan Hutu army and firing two missiles from Masaka hill east of the runway where the plane was coming in to land.
But the RPF government now in power in Kigali blames the attack on Hutu extremists within the FAR national army seeking to eliminate Habyarimana in order to launch a coup. The two presidents were returning from a summit in neighboring Tanzania to revamp a 1993 peace deal aimed at setting up a transitional government and integrate the RPF rebels.
A Rwandan government-commissioned inquiry concluded that Hutu soldiers shot down the Hutu president’s plane because they were opposed to a powersharing deal he backed.
