Filip Reyntjens persists here in affirming the guilt of the RPF in the attack on the Rwandan president's plane despite the non-lieu (dismissal) which must be rendered by the French justice. If the shot had started from Masaka, as he claims, the plane would have been hit from behind and a jet engine would have exploded, which it did not. In its 1995 book, Reyntjens wrote that the SAM 16 missiles that allegedly shot down the plane
had been taken by the French army in Iraq. Now he asserts that these missiles were coming from Ugandan stocks. He does not take into account the following facts. The identification of the SAM 16 was provided by Colonel Bagosora, initiator of the coup and the massacres, to his lawyer on July 10, 1995, while in December 1995, the ex-FAR affirmed that it was SAM 7. Colonel Galinié, military attaché, declares that the RPF shot down a plane and a helicopter with automatic weapons and not with a missile. The Russian authorities have not confirmed in writing that they have supplied the missiles in question to Uganda. Like the French experts, he is silent on the presence of Mistral missiles in Kigali. Finally, he considers null all the evidences which show that the attack was committed to prevent the implementation of the Arusha peace agreements, the entry of the RPF into the government and the merger of the two armies.
