This former Rwandan officer, who had undergone three years of training with the French special forces, was living discreetly near Troyes. He was the first to arrive at the site of the Rwandan president’s plane crash on 6 April 1994, along with three French soldiers. Amidst the genocide, his unit participated in a dubious operation overseen by a notorious French covert operative.
Spring 2020. A grey car drives slowly along the outskirts of Troyes in the Aube department of the Grand Est region. It turns left, then left again into a blind alley and stops in front of the last house. Identical to dozens of others, it is one of many houses on this ordinary residential estate built on the edge of fields of grain stretching as far as the eye could see. The owner of the house revels in the anonymity and oblivion that such a place offers a man like him.
No one here would suspect that this 63-year-old neighbour could have been linked to the worst crimes thirty years ago in a small country six thousand kilometres away. A permanent French resident since at least 2016, Édouard Kanyamikenke was born in Ngarama in north-eastern Rwanda. He left his country in the summer of 1994, following the genocide of the Tutsi that claimed a million lives.
The first information concerning Édouard Kanyamikenke’s presence in France reached African Facts investigators in the summer of 2019. We have since obtained several documents attesting to his identity and a stable, even comfortable, situation in France. We have been unable to reach him and he has not responded to our requests.
In 1994, Édouard Kanyamikenke was a lieutenant in the Rwandan army and commanded the Commandos de recherche et d’action en profondeur (CRAP), a platoon of 42 elite Rwandan soldiers trained by France. In this capacity, he was involved in some of the key events of this period. His role began in the early minutes of the genocide, on the night of 6 to 7 April 1994.
Crime scene
At around 8.30 p.m. on the evening of 6 April 1994, two missiles were fired within seconds of each other from a corner of a Rwandan army camp, tearing through the sky above Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The aircraft carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down while preparing to land. It crashed into a plot of land adjacent to the presidential residence. All of the passengers were killed. This was the signal for a coup d’état, which had been meticulously planned by the most extremist militants within the regime. The last genocide of the 20th century began that night.
Almost immediately, a small convoy set off from the camp where the two missiles had been launched, heading for the crash site. French commandant (major) Grégoire de Saint-Quentin and two French non-commissioned officers were accompanied by Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke and his CRAP platoon. They were the first to arrive at the scene and the only ones able to access it. They searched for the flight recorder and dismantled the wreckage of the aircraft, which was still smoking, until 1 a.m. De Saint-Quentin and the two non-commissioned officers returned at dawn to finish their search, accompanied by a fourth Frenchman. At around 11 a.m., they left the scene. The black box disappeared and was never seen again. This might have enabled the events to be reconstructed and the origin of the shot to be determined within a few months. However, it took 18 years for the investigation to reveal this.
The first killings took place in the minutes following the attack, around the presidential residence where the three French soldiers were staying. The perpetrators belonged to both the presidential guard and Lieutenant Kanyamikenke’s CRAP platoon, who were spending the night in the area. The Belgian peacekeepers, who were dispatched to the scene by the United Nations Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) on the evening of 6 April, were intercepted, disarmed and detained by the presidential guard and the CRAP platoon until the following day. Other peacekeepers who arrived during the night to “check that the crash site was not being tampered with” were turned back by the same units that had denied them access to the area surrounding the military camp, from which the missiles had been fired, since the previous day.
It was probably no coincidence that Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke and the CRAP platoon were chosen to accompany the French soldiers to the scene of the crime, which would become the epicentre of a genocide that spread throughout the country in the following days. As well as having night vision equipment supplied by France, the CRAP platoon was created by French aid workers sent to Rwanda by the Élysée Palace (the French presidency).
A French creation in Rwanda.
In the months following the outbreak of civil war in Rwanda in October 1990, French Lieutenant Colonel Gilbert Canovas was the Élysée’s representative on the ground. He provided the country’s president and army with recommendations, including territorial grid control of the territory, psychological operations, the use of personnel in civilian clothes and the mobilisation of the population against the enemy. As part of this strategy, he suggested that France create and train a Rwandan CRAP unit. In 1991, he undertook this task with the help of a military assistance and training detachment (DAMI), composed of French special forces.
In August 1992, Captain Grégoire de Saint-Quentin was assigned to provide technical military assistance (AMT) to the Rwandan paratrooper battalion in which the CRAP were trained. He was promoted to the rank of commandant (major) the following year. Three French paratrooper non-commissioned officers supported him in his mission in 1993 and 1994. Two of these officers were specifically responsible for training the CRAP.
Although the CRAP platoon was attached to the Rwandan army’s para-commando battalion, it occupied a special position within the military structure. The military intelligence services (G2) were responsible for “monitoring the use of the CRAP in intelligence gathering”. This information appears in an internal G2 document signed by its commander, Aloys Ntiwiragabo, in July 1993, a copy of which has been obtained by African Facts. The G2 service also hosted another French AMT, Lieutenant ‘Ferdinand’. The G2 was involved at all levels of the 6 April 1994 plot, as revealed in a previous African Facts investigation.
The CRAP, led by Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke, specialised in coups and clandestine and unconventional warfare behind enemy lines, as well as within the government zone. They acquired a sinister reputation between 1991 and 1994. Numerous testimonies, including those of former members of the platoon itself, implicate the CRAP as the perpetrators of arbitrary arrests, torture and summary executions. They are also accused of supervising and training militiamen who would go on to commit genocide, as well as of inciting violence during extremist demonstrations. French soldiers were also directly involved on the front lines with this company between 1992 and 1993.
On 7 April 1994, these shock troops of the Rwandan army sealed off Kigali and led the genocide of the Tutsi. In his memoirs, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, who commanded the Blue Helmets in Rwanda, describes “barricades in the city centre [which] restricted all movement as far as the airport [at the other end of the city]. The reconnaissance battalion and the parachute commando battalion [to which the CRAP was attached] had reinforced the presidential guard. They were well armed, experienced and trained”. One million people would perish in the following hundred days.
Operation “Insecticide”
In May 1994, as the extermination of the Tutsi reached its peak, the CRAP platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke, became embroiled in one of the most shady episodes of French involvement in Rwanda. An obscure mercenary operation which is now the subject of an investigation by the crimes against humanity division of the Paris Court of First Instance.
In early May 1994, Captain Paul Barril — a controversial figure who was formerly head of the GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention Group,an elite tactical unit) and the Élysée’s anti-terrorist unit, and who was now working in private security — arrived in Rwanda with a small team. Barril had already been in the area a month earlier, when the president’s plane was shot down. However, nothing is known about his activities at the time of the attack. He returned to assist the perpetrators of the coup d’état, even though they were in the process of committing genocide. Paul Barril’s operation was known by the code name “Insecticide”. At that time in Rwanda, killers referred to their Tutsi victims as “inyenzi”, a term meaning “cockroach” in Kinyarwanda.
On 28 May 1994, Captain Barril signed a contract worth more than $3 million, retroactively, for the provision of “20 specialised men” to “train and supervise” Rwandan combatants “in the field”. Barril’s services were primarily directed at the Rwandan CRAP, as he explained in an unpublished interview conducted ten years later by Raphaël Glucksmann. According to several testimonies, Barril and his instructors provided the CRAP with training in the north of the country before embarking on a series of actions whose nature remains unclear. The captain himself boasted about these actions in several interviews, but it is impossible to separate the truth from the falsehoods in his statements.
Did the French authorities approved this murky operation? We are unable to answer that question. However, in a note dated 6 May 1994 to French President François Mitterrand, General Christian Quesnot, Chief of Staff at the Élysée Palace, wrote the following: “In the absence of a direct strategy in the region, which may be politically difficult to implement, we have the means and channels for an indirect strategy that could restore a certain balance”.
Linked closely to Franco-Rwandan military cooperation, the CRAP platoon led by Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke has not revealed all its secrets. Its activities before and during the genocide remain a grey area, one that parliamentarians, police officers, judges and historians have been unable to shed light on for 31 years.
Colonel Gilbert Canovas, who established the CRAP in Rwanda, passed away in 2002 at the age of 56. Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, covered in medals, ended his career in 2020 with the rank of army general — the highest in the French military hierarchy. Captain Paul Barril, placed under the status of assisted witness (a legal status under French criminal law when the person has not been formally charged), has been under investigation for twelve years for “complicity in crimes against humanity”.
Following the collapse of the genocidal forces in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) between November 1996 and early 1997, Lieutenant Édouard Kanyamikenke fled to neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville in 1998, subsequently passing through the Central African Republic before settling in Cameroon around 2008. He has been living peacefully in France since at least 2016, as African Facts reveals. Remarkably, he has never been questioned about his presence alongside the French at the scene of the crime on 6–7 April 1994, nor about his possible involvement in the Rwandan genocide or the mysterious “Insecticide” operation led by French mercenaries.
