Rwanda Leader Met Death Near His House

An empty champagne bottle lies in the yard and the smell of death lingers in Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s home, where he died seven weeks ago when his plane crashed and plowed into his own back garden.

Rebels have looted the president’s bar of alcohol and taken most of his clothes. But the house is still packed with family belongings, documents and mementos of 17 years as supreme ruler, until faltering moves toward pluralism began in 1990.

His plane was reportedly hit by a rocket as it approached Kigali on April 6, unleashing an orgy of slaughter that aid officials estimate has killed at least 200,000 people.

Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who inspected the crash site just southeast of the airport Thursday with U.N. officers jeer at the twist of fate that killed him so near home.

Government troops had denied U.N. investigators access to the crash site for weeks, but the area fell under rebel control when they seized the airport and a nearby military barracks last Sunday.

The plane slammed into a banana grove, losing its wings and tail before punching a 25-foot hole in the garden wall and coming to rest on the edge of a pond.

The leading edge of the right wing appeared to have been hit from below by a projectile. U.N. officers said they were assembling a team to investigate the crash.

A self-declared government that took power after the president’s death says it recovered the “black box” flight recorder but was too busy to send it abroad for analysis.

It blames the rocket attack on the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which denies it.

An aircraft seat lay at the bottom of the empty pond in the grounds of the three-story luxury house, one of several presidential residences in Kigali and not Habyarimana’s principal palace.

Ironically, Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, and his family were staying there when his plane narrowly missed it.

Since capturing the area, rebels have partially looted the house but said the president’s wife removed most recent official papers before fleeing to Paris as the civil war resumed.