Nairobi - An exiled Hutu Rwandan party on Saturday urged President Paul Kagame to resign after he was accused of masterminding the 1994 assassination of his predecessor triggering the genocide of a million people.
In a statement sent to AFP, the Democratic Republican Movement, the main Hutu party, said it "called on Paul Kagame to resign from the presidency of the Republic of Rwanda in favour of those who don't have blood on their hands".
Kagame's predecessor, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, died in an airplane crash in April 1994 sparking the massacres up to one million people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, in the central African country.
The French daily Le Monde reported on March 10 that French police investigators had concluded that Kagame ordered a rocket attack that shot down a plane carrying Habyarimana as it came in to land at Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.
The party's statement said Kagame should hand over to those who have "no interest in hampering the course of national and international justice."
The day after Habyarimana's plane was shot down, Hutu extremist militias and the Rwandan army, which at the time was controlled by Hutus, launched a 100-day massacre, in which least 800 000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus opposed to the slaughter were killed.
Kagame led his mainly Tutsi rebels to seize Kigali and put an end to the orgy of violence in July 1994. - Sapa-AFP