French authorities have ruled a Paris court can try a Rwandan Hutu shopkeeper alleged to have participated in the execution of Tutsi civilians in 1994 on genocide and crimes against humanity charges.
Madjaliwa Safari, 59 and living in France since 2009, will be tried by a special court over the execution of ethnic Tutsi civilians, including children.
He is alleged to have participated in the execution of Tutsi civilians between April and July 1994 in the former prefectures of Gitarama and Butare, according to the indictment order signed on Thursday and seen by AFP on Friday.
According to the charge sheet, Safari is suspected of having ordered the killing of ethnic Tutsis during the country's bloody civil war.
He is accused of working as a guard overseeing a checkpoint whose purpose was to check people's ethnicity via their identity papers and to execute Tutsis.
"Mr. Safari categorically denies the accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity ... and has instructed me to appeal," his lawyer, Philippe Meilhac, told AFP.
Meilhac criticised what he termed "the increasingly political dimension" of the "processing of the cases of Rwandan nationals prosecuted under the universal jurisdiction" of France.
France's national anti-terrorist prosecutor's office requested a trial for Safari in late October.
But investigating magistrates then ordered the case dismissed.
Investigators have established a Rwandan court sentenced Safari to 15 years in prison in 2007. But he did not serve his sentence, according to a source close to the case.
In 2019, on the basis of an arrest warrant issued in July 2017 by the Rwandan prosecutor general, Rwandan authorities asked the French legal system to extradite him, which it refused to do.
However the anti-terrorist prosecutor's office, enjoying jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, entrusted investigations to a specialised investigating judge in November 2019.
Safari, who since 2017 has enjoyed refugee status, was then arrested in July of last year, charged and detained.
France has to date hosted eight trials relating to the 1994 genocide, when an estimated 800,000 people -- mostly ethnic Tutsis -- were slaughtered by the Hutu majority.
In October, in the most recent case, a French court jailed a former doctor for 27 years for aiding Rwanda's then authorities to disseminate anti-Tutsi propaganda and participating in mass murder by attempting to destroy evidence of genocide.