Enlarge imagePARIS (Reuters) - France’s Defence Minister has ordered that 105 secret intelligence reports be handed over to a judge investigating allegations that Paris helped Rwanda’s former Hutu government massacre ethnic Tutsis in a 1994 genocide.
Spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau said on Thursday that Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie had taken the decision on Tuesday on the recommendation of a consultative body that reviews requests for the release of secret state papers.
Bureau said he had no details of the precise content of the reports by the DGSE foreign intelligence service, which are to be handed over to investigating magistrate Florence Michon.
In November 2005, France launched an official investigation into complaints by six Rwandan survivors of the massacre who accused France of complicity in crimes against humanity.
Advertisement starts
Advertisement ends
An estimated 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in the 100-day slaughter by Hutu militia.
France sent troops to Rwanda at the height of the genocide under a U.N.-authorised operation, saying it was safeguarding the provision of food and emergency medical services of humanitarian organisations.
France has said tens of thousands of Tutsis were saved in the area where they were sent and a French parliamentary probe in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said "strategic errors" had been made.
"France acted within the terms of the mandate that the UN Security Council gave it," Bureau said.
Genocide survivors tell a different story. In the hilltop village of Bisesero, for example, they say French soldiers told Tutsis they would protect them, only to herd them in one place where they were later hacked to death by Hutus.
A Rwandan government-appointed commission last month launched a probe into the actions of French troops.
