Rwanda's most wanted genocide fugitive Felicien Kabuga is expected to be arraigned before a Paris court on Tuesday, French lawyer Emmanuel Altit told Reuters.
Altit, a senior lawyer, is reportedly one of the individuals on Kabuga's defence team.
"The court will set out the legal process before passing the case to investigative judges within eight days," Reuters reported on Monday.
The court will later decide whether to hand Kabuga to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which replaced the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
If the court decides to hand Kabuga to the UN court, the Genocide mstemind will still have a chance to appeal against the ruling at France's Court of Cassation, which hears whether rulings conform with the law.
Children led investigators to Kabuga
Kabuga was arrested on Saturday in what French prosecution and police said was a "sophisticated, coordinated operation with simultaneous searches across a number of locations."
Reuters said French intelligence agents spied on the children of Kabuga to track him down to an apartment in a Paris suburb and end a 26-year-long manhunt, the head of the police unit who arrested Felicien Kabuga said.
The inquiry gathered pace in March after an intelligence sharing meeting between investigators from France, Britain, and Belgium, home to some of Kabuga’s children, as well as Europe’s Europol law enforcement agency and a team from MICT.
The coronavirus lockdown paralysing most of Europe meant many investigations were put on hold, allowing a focus on Kabuga’s file, said Eric Emeraux, head of the Gendarmerie’s Central Office for Combating Crimes against Humanity.
The dragnet subsequently closed in on one of the alleged chief financiers of the Genocide against the Tutsi in which over a million people were killed in just 100 days.
"We realised ... that trail from the children protecting their father converged on Asnieres-sur-Seine,” Emeraux told Reuters, referring to a
Paris suburb. "We also discovered one of his children was renting an apartment there.”
Wiretaps were installed and the property placed under surveillance. Intelligence indicated there was good reason to believe that someone other than one of his offspring was residing in the apartment.
"We decided to open the door, without being entirely sure of who we would find inside,” Emeraux said. "I didn’t sleep the night before.”
The 84-year-old fugitive had been living in a third-floor flat on the Rue du Reverend Pere Christian Gilbert in Asnieres-sur-Seine, a well-off neighbourhood on the northern fringe of Paris.
Neighbours said he had lived in the upscale neighbourhood for about five years.
Kabuga was the majority shareholder of Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a virulent outlet that played a central role in mobilising Interahamwe militia to kill Tutsis.
He was also a member of Akazu an influential group of few highly influential people which was at the centre of the organisation of the Genocide against the Tutsi.