While the mayor and bishop of Orléans refused to bury Protais Zigiranyirazo, who is suspected of masterminding the wheeler-dealer circle that promoted the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwandan, and while two investigating judges are attempting to clear former first lady Agathe Kanziga, who is also suspected of belonging to this circle, African Facts investigated the survival of this network.
“It is well established that Protais Zigiranyirazo belonged to the inner circle of advisers and family members of Rwandan President Habyarimana, known as the “Akazu”, and it is common knowledge that this inner circle of Rwandan power was involved in preparing and planning the genocide”, wrote a French judge at the Orléans Administrative Court in an order dated 28 August 2025. “The mayor of Orléans could, without error of law or assessment, base his decision to refuse burial authorisation on Protais Zigiranyirazo’s serious and direct involvement in the Rwandan genocide”. Several hundred people were initially expected to attend the funeral of this Rwandan in Orléans, France, on Thursday 28 August. Zigiranyirazo died in Niger on 3 August 2025, aged 87. The service was scheduled to take place at the Church of Saint-Paterne, “one of the largest religious buildings in the town”.
Zigiranyirazo was initially sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for his central role in the Tutsi genocide, which left one million people dead between April and July 1994. But he was acquitted on appeal due to procedural irregularities.
The funeral, which the Bishop of Orléans had refused to conduct in accordance with the family’s demands, was banned at the last minute by order of the city’s mayor and confirmed by the administrative magistrate. The judge ruled that there were “proven risks of disturbances to public order resulting from both the burial of the deceased in the municipal cemetery and the potential establishment of a memorial site”.
Nicknamed “Monsieur Z” in his native country, the deceased was considered the mastermind of a clan of wheeler-dealers who ruled Rwanda. African Facts had already mention this individual in a previous investigation shedding light on the links between the former presidential family and actors involved in the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During our investigation, it became apparent that the Habyarimana family retains influence and has numerous contacts within the Rwandan extremist diaspora. This is the case with Zigiranyirazo’s younger sister, the former First Lady of Rwanda, Agathe Kanziga. Today, their children are involved in the activities of those nostalgic for the former regime.
The matriarch
Vincent Duclert headed a French commission set up by the French President whose report concluded that there was “heavy and damning responsibility” for France’s role and involvement during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi which left a million people dead in Rwanda in 1994. “I think that the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is going to reopen the case of Agathe [Kanziga] Habyarimana” he told on french public radio on 29 March 2021. The years have passed and it has to be said that his prediction has not come true.
Even worse, on 20 August 2025, two French investigating judges dismissed the case in favour of Agathe Kanziga. According to the magistrates, she would appeared “not as an author of the genocide, but rather as a victim of this terrorist attack [against President Juvénal Habyarimana, the starting signal for the genocide Ed.], during which she lost not only her husband, but also her brother and close relatives, and as a result of which she was forced into exile”. This decision raises many questions. The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) and the civil parties contested the end of the investigation. On 21 May, the Court of Appeal held an audience to rule on the issue. However, the decision to dismiss the case was taken without waiting for the Court of Appeal’s ruling.
“The archival documents we have collected show Agathe Habyarimana’s significant involvement in the genocide of the Tutsis. Like her brother, the mastermind of the Zero network, the secret general staff responsible for the extermination of the Tutsis,” historian Vincent Duclert insisted on French national radio three days after the decision not to take further action. According to Duclert, “a supplementary investigation seems clearly necessary”.
Agathe Kanziga, the former first lady of Rwanda has for 30 years been the embodiment of the Élysée’s terrible compromise with the regime that promoted the Tutsi genocide. She was evacuated from Rwanda in the early days of the genocide at the personal request of French President François Mitterrand. Although she has been permanently living in France since 1998, she has never managed to regularise her administrative situation.
In Rwanda, a business clan organised in concentric circles around Agathe Kanziga’s family concentrated all the power. This group was nicknamed the Akazu (“the household” in Kinyarwanda) or the Zero Network, depending on the source. Its members are strongly suspected of having imagined, planned and supervised the genocide against the Tutsis. The existence of such a group, however informal it may have been, is nothing like a “persistent rumour” as the two French magistrates who dismissed the case in favour of Agathe described it. In a 2008 judgement, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had estimated that “it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that a power group consisting primarily of members of the extended family of the President existed before and during the genocide”. And in another judgement in 2009, the ICTR stated that “The Akazu exercised substantial political and financial power in Rwanda and included the President of Rwanda’s family members as well as persons from the regions of Bushiru, Gisenyi and Ruhengeri”.
Agathe Kanziga herself is accused by witnesses of having ordered some of the first killings during the genocide. She has been the subject of a complaint in France since 2007. France has refused to extradite her to Rwanda, but has not yet brought her to trial within a reasonable timeframe. And now, the PNAT and the civil parties are appealing the dismissal in his favour.
In exile, Agathe Kanziga has forged a public persona as a grieving widow. She has consistently denied all the charges against her in front of investigators and judges. In the hearings consulted by African Fact, the former First Lady presented herself as a simple “housewife” who had nothing to do with power and onlyappeared in a ceremonial role at official receptions.
This version is contradicted by various works, including a very serious investigation in English, published in 2019 by the British journalist Andrew Wallis under the title Stepp’d in blood. A well-documented 744-page work that plunges into the heart of the Akazu of the 1990s. A network through which Agathe Kanziga was much more than the extra she describes.
And from her exile in Paris, the former Rwandan presidential family may well have remained more influential than she claims.
Exiled Akazu
On 6 September 2016, Agathe Kanziga, her youngest son Jean-Luc and her eldest daughter Jeanne woke up before dawn. It looked like being a very cloudy day. At 6.10 am, Courcouronnes was plunged into thick darkness when three gendarmes and a policeman arrived at the Habyarimana clan’s villa. The investigators searched the premises for four hours. They seized computer equipment and discovered a few notes scattered on loose sheets of papers, as well as a handwritten directory, written down by the former First Lady, which African Facts has consulted.
By cross-referencing the information it contains with data collected by African Facts from various Belgian and French government administrations, it can now be established that Agathe Kanziga maintained direct relations with leading members of sixteen Rwandan extremist associations based in Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Lille, Namur, Orléans, Paris, Rouen and Dendermonde.
All these associations are more or less closely linked as part of a network that was initially set up to raise funds in Europe on behalf of the Rassemblement pour le retour de la démocratie au Rwanda (RDR, now renamed Forces démocratiques unifiées), which in 1995 had brought together Rwandan genocidaires in exile with the aim of regaining control of Rwanda by force.
Some of the Habyarimana family’s contacts in the RDR network were invited to a reception organised by the Habyarimana clan in June 2012, where they were asked to contribute to a mysterious group. The invitations and accounts for this event, consulted by African Facts, were stored on a computer seized by investigators at Agathe Kanziga’s home.
The guests were all escapees from Rwanda’s former elite. And according to a former senior regime official, Christophe Mfizi, they used to meet under the guise of private parties, lunches, dinners, weddings or even birthdays, where orders were given.
In a previous article, we revealed how one of the guests, Jean Chrysostome Nyirurugo, a genocide suspect, had become involved with an organisation whose armed wing has been causing bloodshed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo for several years.
In addition to the extended presidential family, there were three members of the Antwerp-based association Afribel, which until recently ran the traditional Rwandan dance group Umutsama. One of them, from the same village as the First Lady, Giciye, has been on the association’s board for no less than fourteen years. He is the son-in-law of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the former Minister of Family and Women’s Empowerment of Rwanda and a close friend of Agathe Kanziga. Nyiramasuhuko is serving a life sentence reduced on appeal to 47 years by the ICTR and was the first woman to be convicted of rape as a crime against humanity. The guest’s brother-in-law, Arsene Ntahobari, was the youngest ICTR defendant, tried in the same trial and sentenced to the same punishment. Afribel’s members also include Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s own daughter and the wife of a former Rwandan mayor, Elie Ndayambaje, who was also tried at the same ICTR trial and sentenced to the same punishment.
The association Afribel was deregistered in January 2024 for failing to comply with new legislation requiring ASBLs to declare their “beneficial owners”. In an internal memorandum drafted in 1996 and consulted by Afrcan Facts, the RDR explicitly planned to “create associations (NGOs, folk groups, etc.) to provide cover for fund-raising or transit activities”.
Other relatives of people sentenced by the ICTR attend the agapes organised by the Habyarimana family, such as the son of the commander of the Rwandan para-commando battalion, Major Aloys Ntabakuze, who was sentenced to 35 years for genocide by the same institution.
Some of the thirty or so guests are themselves genocide suspects, such as the 70-year-old former Minister of Health, Jean-Baptiste Ndalihoranye, also from Giciye village. A source who was once close to this group described him to us as “the Habyarimana family’s interface in diaspora affairs”. And the data we collected from the Belgian administration shows that since 2001 he has been involved in several extremist associations dedicated to collecting money and registered in the Brussels region. He has been on the board of one of these associations since 2005 and was its president from 2008 to 2018. However, since 1996, Jean-Baptiste Ndalihoranye has been on the list of individuals whom Rwanda considers to be “category one genocidaires” and wishes to prosecute.
Reading these documents, which shed light on Agathe Kanziga’s entourage, the public image of a reclusive, apolitical devotee is somewhat undermined. A parallel network seems to be emerging within the network of associations that dominate the extremist diaspora in Europe. So far, Agathe Kanziga and those close to her have left little material evidence of their role in the Rwandan inner circle. But in France, the former presidential clan is in fact sometimes directly involved in the activities of the extremist diaspora.
On 12 October 2019, six people met in a student residence in L’Haÿ-les-Roses, Val-de-Marne, to draw up the statutes of an association called “Jambo France”, affiliated to the Belgian association of the same name, whose website is now one of the showcase of extremist discourse.
Among the participants at the meeting was Léon Habyarimana, 49 years old and none other than one of Agathe Kanziga’s sons. He is married to one of the businessman Félicien Kabuga’s daughters. Kabuga is suspected of being the main financier of the Tutsi genocide and was arrested in the Paris region on May 16, 2020. However, he was deemed “unfit” to stand trial.
“I know that Léon was at the meeting we had with the people we wanted to invite to launch this branch of Jambo in France. I hope he will be a member and I have no problem with that” said the president of the Belgian Jambo association, who immediately acknowledged that “the Habyarimana children are friends”. The Jambo president’s wish was granted. Léon became secretary-general of Jambo-France and “the first representative of the association”.
On April 17, 2021, three of Habyarimana’s children — Léon, Jean-Luc, and Marie-Merci — signed a memmorandum for another association named “Juvénal Habyarimana for Justice, Peace, Unity, and Dignity”, whose purpose is, notably, to “promote the vision and ideals of President Juvénal Habyarimana […] as well as his rehabilitation in history”. Quite a program in a few words…