A PARIS court ruled on Monday that a Rwandan former army officer accused of taking part in the genocide of 1994 should be handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Francois-Xavier Nzuwonemeye, 45, was arrested at his home in Montauban in southwest France on February 15, on the basis of a warrant from the UN court, which sits in Arusha in Tanzania. The tribunal described Nzuwonemeye as a “high-ranking military officer,” without publicly specifying his role in the organised slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus. The genocide began in April 1994 and was perpetrated by troops of the then majority Hutu government, Hutu extremist youth militias and mobs before rebels of the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) seized Kigali in July that year. Nzuwonemeye is the second Rwandan arrested in France at the request of the ICTR.