How the KK saga played out in London

[mchambawima1]

Lt. Gen. Karenzi Karake arrives in Kigali from the United Kingdom.




The recent saga of Rwandan intelligence service chief Lt. Gen. Karenzi Karake in the United Kingdom ended with "KK" a free man. And his freedom could lead to Spain dropping all the arrest warrants against senior Rwandan military officials issued by one junior judge, a certain Fernando Andreu Merelles, should Rwanda pursue the matter.

Spanish judicial authorities are now on court record actually admitting they had no case against "KK" that could lead to his extradition to Spain.
The whole affair – the arresting of a senior military official traveling on a diplomatic passport was beyond preposterous right from the start.

In a BBC interview, former UK secretary for international development (Dfid), Andrew Mitchell said it was a "Misuse of the European arrest warrant system. It is being used for political reasons, not judicial ones, and it is politically motivated, enacted by supporters of the genocidal regime in Rwanda which killed a million people and it is being used against those who stopped the Genocide."

What Mr. Mitchell may not have known was that some of those very supporters of the Genocide he mentions are actually resident in his country's capital, London.

The person who orchestrated the campaign to have KK arrested in the UK is Rene Mugenzi, a Rwandan with British nationality who has succeeded in convincing communities in London as well as British authorities that he is a survivor of the Genocide of the Tutsis in 1994.

Mugenzi in fact is the son of Joseph Mugenzi, a suspected participant in the Genocide who now lives in The Netherlands and has Dutch citizenship. The senior Mugenzi is a founder member of Victoire Ingabire's FDU Inkingi – which has been proven to be working to promote genocidal ideology – and was at a time its chairman.

Rene Claudel Mugenzi's Wikipedia page details that he was born in Russia in the city of Pyatigorski. Anyone who knows something about the Habyarimana regime will tell you Russia was amongst the countries they used to send the most favored youth of Habyarimana's MRND ruling party. Mugenzi was born to favored parents, to the aristocracy of the Habyarimana administration.


Rene Mugenzi.



Last year the Dutch government got suspicious of old man Mugenzi's possible role in the genocide, especially due to his links to FDU Inkingi, and was considering stripping him of his citizenship.

The younger Mugenzi (Rene) meanwhile has convinced everyone in his adopted country that he is a "political" and "human rights activist". His activities upon close scrutiny would be enough to convince any objective observer that – at least when it comes to Rwanda – this is no human rights activist. This is a person committed to the politics of ethnic extremism and the denial of genocide.

A network in Europe
Mugenzi however has managed to amass considerable goodwill amongst many unsuspecting British citizens that he is "genuinely" committed to "promoting human rights" in Rwanda. Through a network of likeminded people in the UK and Europe they have managed to hoodwink any number of less knowledgeable people that the true villains of human rights in Rwanda are President Kagame and the ruling party, RPF.

When KK was at London's Heathrow Airport ready to return home on 20 June this year and the London Metropolitan Police arrested him and had him detained, it was the doing of Rene Claudel Mugenzi and his contacts in Spain, Fernando Andreu Merelles among them.

Junior judge Andreu is known to his peers as a showoff; a reckless individual given to grandstanding and using the principal of universal jurisdiction to pursue political vendettas against foreigners.

Mugenzi's and his network of Spanish jurists – allied to Andreu – tipped off the Metropolitan Police about the "presence in the UK of a ‘dangerous Rwandan terrorist' responsible among others for the deaths of Spanish nationals on Rwandan territory and for whom an arrest warrant is pending."
It may appear that the London Police did not do any background check on the warrants and simply apprehended Gen. Karake, whisking him off to detention.

Had the Met done even a cursory examination of the warrant's backgrounds they would – if they were acting purely out of good faith – have let KK leave without any bother. As it is their arrest and detention of a senior official of a friendly country left everyone – in the Police, in the judicial system, in the Foreign Office – with egg on their face.

The "case" of Andreu was so spectacularly bogus that a diplomat, former US ambassador to Rwanda Michael Arietti, describing it – in a dispatch to Washington later brought to public light by Wikileaks – could only use blunt language.

"The Spanish Indictments: outrageous and inaccurate", said Arietti's cable. It continued: "the Spanish indictment of 40 Rwandan military officers offers an unrecognizable version of some of the most painful and violent episodes in Rwandan history, distorting the established record, inventing mass killings, placing blame for any misfortune Rwandans have suffered (including the 1994 Genocide) on the Kagame government."

The cable, dated 24 April 2008 went on to call the indictments "a bloated political tract, sloppily organized and endlessly repetitive."

That is the tract and similar others that Mugenzi, his Spanish friends and deniers of the Genocide of the Tutsis who are all over Europe are still springing on unknowing Europeans as "proof that the RPF is a ‘criminal organization' that has committed genocide." It is a whole industry in some circles.

For its part, the Spanish High Court has already annulled Andreu's warrants, but genocide denialist dead-enders are still keeping the indictments alive by appealing to the Spanish Supreme Court claiming they will prove their "case".

But theirs looks a losing position by the day – the more people with less jaundiced eyes look at Andreu's indictments, the more astonished they are that any competent judicial system could even for a moment accommodate this political nonsense.

Which is what Senior District Judge Howard Riddle must have been thinking when he effectively told Lt. Gen. Karake there was no case against him and he was free to go home. That was on 10 August this month in the Westminster Magistrates Court.

Spanish judicial authorities were the ones who had told the court they had no interest in the extradition of Karake; perhaps they knew better than anybody else how mendacious and contrived was their boy Andreu's indictments.

KK walked out of the court after being detained in the UK ten days short of two months.

Meanwhile Rene Claudel Mugenzi is still looking for other embarrassing ways to hoodwink British authorities in his endless efforts to frame the Rwandan administration for crimes that are inventions of him and others like him.

Source: How the KK saga played out in London