PUBLISHED ONJune 25, 2015 12:21 PM
KIGALI - Rwandan President Paul Kagame launched a furious attack on Western countries on Thursday after the arrest in Britain of the country's intelligence chief.
"Absolute arrogance and contempt is the only basis for this arrest," Kagame said in a speech to parliament.
"They must have mistaken him for an illegal immigrant. The way they treat illegal immigrants is the way they treat all of us. Black people have become targets for shooting practice," he said. "We cannot accept that people treat us this way just because they can."
President Paul Kagame's speech came on the same day that spy chief General Karenzi Karake is due to appear in court in London following his arrest under a Spanish indictment accusing him of genocide and murder.
Describing Karake as a "freedom fighter" Kagame accused European countries of racism and seeking to humiliate Rwanda -- and Africans -- in order to mask their own complicity in the 1994 genocide that left around 800,000 people dead, most of them Tutsis.
"They want to mask their responsibility by saying it's not us, it is savages of Africa who killed each other," he said.
Kagame questioned the right of Britain to act on the Spanish indictment, issued in 2008, that accuses Karake of mass ethnic killings of Hutus in the wake of the 1994 genocide and of orchestrating the murder of three Spanish aid workers in 1997.
"What right does this country have to arrest him in this manner? None of them have any basis other than absolute arrogance," he said.