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The Rwandan justice arrested Paul Rusesabagina, former director of the Hotel Mil Colinad in Kigali, who inspired the movie “Hotel Rwanda” and saved hundreds of people in the 1994 genocide, accused of terrorism and belonging to an armed group.
“Rusesabagina is suspected of being the founder, leader, sponsor and member of violent, armed and extremist gangs,” Mulangira Thierry, spokesman for the Rwanda Investigative Office (RIB), said on Monday.
Paul Rusesabagina, 66, became a very critical opponent of President Paul Kagamé and lived in exile between Belgium and the United States, where he created a foundation that promotes reconciliation to prevent further genocides.
The former manager of Rwanda’s most famous hotel, which housed more than 1,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the genocide to save them from extremist Hutus, had an international arrest warrant for crimes such as the murder and kidnapping of Rwandan civilians.
The Rwandan justice accuses him of belonging to “terrorist groups”, as a platform of the opposition Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRCD-Ubumwe), of which he was founder, and that he possesses military weapons that attack Rwandan territory.
Rusesabagina’s work at the Hotel Mil Colinas inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda” (2004), based on the story of this influential Hutu businessman, married to a Tutsi, who managed to protect some 1,200 people from the military and genocides by giving them the welcome. in the hotel facilities.
In 2005, the former president of the United States, George Bush, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work and heroic deeds. However, the Ibuka Genocide Victims Association claims that his role as savior in the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 people died in just over 100 days, has been exaggerated.
In 2010, the Public Ministry accused him, along with opposition leader Victoire Ingabire, of financing terrorist activities and armed groups. On these charges, Ingabire, Kagamé’s main political enemy, was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in prison until his release by presidential pardon in September 2018.
In an interview with Efe in 2014, the opposition leader assured that she initially supported the current president, but “the Kagame government has become less democratic every year. There is no shared power or political space ”. “I think he became a millionaire dictator who cares about his own fortune, not the Rwandans,” he said at the time.
