President Paul Kagame of Rwanda yesterday accused France of direct responsibility for the 1994 genocide of at least 800,000 people in the central African country.

His remarks reignited a bitter diplomatic row bewteen Rwanda and France and threatened attempts to mark the 10th anniversary of the killings with dignity.

M Kagame claimed that the French government supplied weapons, logistical support and even senior military planners to the regime of militant ethnic Hutus responsible for the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Diplomats and witnesses to the genocide have often accused France of tacit involvement, but Mr Kagame's comments are the most explicit statement of the allegations.

He made them after a French police report, which took six years to prepare, blamed him for the shooting down of a plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's then president and an ethnic Hutu, on April 6, 1994...

...In at least one case, French troops moved United Nations peacekeepers away from a college where they were protecting 2,000 Tutsis. After the peacekeepers were moved, the Tutsis were slaughtered. Mr Kagame said the police report blaming him for Mr Habyarimana's death was a politically motivated attempt to deflect blame from France.

"In '91 or '92 I was in Paris at the invitation of the authorities and an official said to me, 'If you do not stop the war, by the time you arrive in Kigali you will all be dead'.

"I never forgot those words which are proof of the involvement of the French government, or of certain elements."...