Documentation for Zero Network (Akazu)
May 18, 1994
Courier-Mail
Last September, a Rwandan newspaper, Umurava, reported the existence of a so-called Zero Network, run by Hutu extremists close to the late President Juvenal Habyarimana and organised by members of the military and police forces. Many analysts believe it was members of this Zero Network, most of whom were northern Hutus, who killed Habyarimana to prevent implementation of the Arusha Accord. Violent demonstrations, assassinations and death threats in the first few months of this year were all attributed to the extremists.
Yet it was the systematic precision of the killings of most major Hutu opposition figures and civilian Tutsi leaders within the first 24 hours after the president's fatal plane crash (see accompanying box) that convinced many that rumours of hit lists and death squads circulating in Kigali were true. (...)
Protias Zigiranyirazo, the late president's brother-in-law and reportedly one of the main financial backers of the Zero Network, has been widely linked to the 1985 murder of American primate researcher Dian Fossey, who threatened to expose his involvement in the illicit international gorilla trade
July 4, 1994
Newsweek
Critics even charge that the French trained Rwandan death squads, known as the Zero Network.
July 30, 2001
Agence France Press
Zed is also alleged to have been a member of Zero Network, described by the ICTR as a "net-work of coercive relationships or influential persons" set up in 1990 and which, as a subset of Akazu, had links to death squads. (…)
In 1993, before the genocide and therefore outside the temporal jurisdiction of the ICTR, the International Human Rights Federation accused Zero Network of carrying out killings of Tutsis and Hutus opposed to Habyarimana's regime.
Oct. 4, 2001
Agence France Press
Zigiranyirazo was prefect of Ruhengeri in northwest Rwanda from 1974 to 1989 and was also a wealthy businessman. According to the ICTR indictment, he was perceived as a member of the Akazu, the powerful circle around Habyarimana's wife Agathe and members of her family. Ac-cording to Kigali and international human rights groups, Akazu was the mastermind of the genocide.
The ICTR indictment also links Zigiranyirazo to death squads and the so-called "Zero Network" which, according to human rights organisations, were formed after Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front guerrillas attempted to invade Rwanda in 1990.
April 3, 2002
The Guardian (London)
Two years before the genocide Col Bagosora was instrumental in the creation of the Zero Network, a civilian-military death squad that committed massacres before the genocide was unleashed.
Dec. 18, 2008
The Evening Standard (London)
In its ruling, the court said: "The chamber has found Zigiranyirazo guilty of having participated in a joint criminal enterprise with the common purpose of committing genocide and extermina-tion, as well as aiding and abetting genocide." Zigiranyirazo, 70, was accused of being a mem-ber of the notorious Zero Network of death squads which killed hundreds of Tutsis and opposi-tion leaders in the years leading up to the genocide.
In their indictment, prosecutors said Zigiranyirazo paid militia to dig a mass grave outside his compound to bury those killed.
