Félicien Kabuga, long described as a key financier of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, died last Saturday at the age of 93 while hospitalized in The Hague, the Netherlands. His death has reopened wounds for victims’ families, leaving them torn between unresolved grief and a profound sense of denied justice.

Kabuga's death was announced by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) and is unlikely to bring closure to those affected. Instead, it marks a painful interruption to efforts to fully document his alleged role in the genocide, in which close to a million people, specifically over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in 100 days. Questions about the extent of the networks he built and the machinery of hate he was said to have financed may now remain partially unanswered.

The former businessman and radio station owner was among the last fugitives sought over the genocide. Prosecutors accused Kabuga of promoting hate speech through his broadcaster, Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, and of helping arm ethnic Hutu militias during the atrocity.

After more than two decades on the run, Kabuga was arrested in France in 2020 and subsequently extradited to The Hague. He was later ruled unfit to stand trial because of dementia and was also deemed too ill to return to Rwanda. With no country willing to accept him, Kabuga remained in the U.N. detention centre in The Hague until his passing. The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, which oversees remaining cases from the former U.N. tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, has ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of his death.