How Switzerland let an alleged mastermind of the genocide in Rwanda slip away

In 1994 Switzerland failed to arrest the man known as the “financier” of the genocide in Rwanda while he was on Swiss soil. As Bern begins work on a report revisiting this episode, SWI swissinfo.ch looks at the case of Félicien Kabuga and its reverberating consequences 30 years later. Félicien Kabuga spent 25 years on the run. For much of that time, he had a $5 million (CHF4.5 million) bounty on his head, put up by the United States after international prosecutors accused him of helping to instigate the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group. By the time he was nabbed in France in 2020, Kabuga was well into his eighties. Last year judges at The Hague deemed him unfit to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, thereby ending a long-anticipated legal process against him. But Kabuga’s story could have taken a different turn. In July 1994, as the genocide was coming to an end, Kabuga entered Switzerland on a visa. Four weeks later the Swiss expelled him to ...