Movements of ‘Hotel Rwanda hero’ arrested in Kigali may have been closely tracked by spyware say supporters. Rwandan dissidents say they suspect that Paul Rusesabagina, the inspiration behind the film Hotel Rwanda, was hacked or otherwise tracked using surveillance technology in the days before his arrest this week by the Rwandan government, raising questions about the country’s alleged use of spyware.
Rusesabagina, 66, who won international acclaim for saving 1,200 Rwandans during the country’s genocide – who has been more recently a prominent critic of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, appears to have been apprehended by authorities while he was on a trip to Dubai and reportedly left the United Arab Emirates on a private jet last week.
Days later he was seen in handcuffs in Rwanda, where he has been arrested on terrorism-related charges.
Rwandan government accused of abducting Paul Rusesabagina
The circumstances around the arrest are still a mystery and have prompted suspicion among dissidents that Rusesabagina – who holds EU citizenship, living in Belgium, and also the US as a green-card holder – was kidnapped after being closely surveilled and his location tracked.
CNN reported on Wednesday that the UAE had denied involvement in the arrest. Citing an unnamed official, the media outlet said Rusesabagina had arrived in Dubai on Thursday, that he went to a hotel then left for Rwanda five hours later in a private jet, shortly after midnight.
“You cannot just show up and kidnap somebody. You must know the plan,” said Faustin Rukundo, a British citizen who lives in Leeds and is a member of a Rwandan opposition group in exile. “I strongly believe there is hacking somewhere because even his inner circle did not know he was there in Dubai and even some family members did not know he was travelling. It was really kept tight.”
Rukundo said the episode reminded him of an incident last year in which he received a phone call from an anonymous number telling him, “we know that you are travelling to Nairobi”, shortly after he bought a ticket to Kenya. He believed the information had been gleaned from a hacker monitoring his phone or computer, and he decided not to travel.
He said Rwandan dissidents in exile, and even allies of the government, operated under the assumption that they were under constant surveillance.
“We know there are hacks and surveillance. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you have information and you oppose Kigali, that is it, if you make a mistake you are finished,” he said.
The account was backed by Faustin Twagiramungu, a former Rwandan prime minister who has opposed Kagame’s government and lives in exile in Belgium.
“We know they [the Kagame government] have the methods to follow us, but we don’t know how they use it. We sometimes have to change our telephones, either by week or by month,” Twagiramungu said.
Twagiranungu said he had not known that Rusesabagina was going to Dubai, but that he had since heard that his fellow dissident, with whom he had regular contact, had been in touch with his children over his mobile phone once he arrived.
Kagame, Rwanda’s veteran leader, has won praise for the economic development and stability that his country has experienced since the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 people were killed. The 62-year-old has also spearheaded gender equality, and dramatically boosted literacy
But Kagame, who has been president since 2000 and won his most recent election in 2017 with 99% of the vote, is also accused of authoritarianism and extreme intolerance of any critical voices or threats to his political dominance.
The Rwandan government has also been repeatedly accused of targeting dissidents overseas.
A 2014 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report detailed 13 cases of former RPF politicians, military figures, intelligence agents and journalists who had fled Rwanda and been assassinated, abducted or attacked in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa or the UK.
“The government dominated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front – a former rebel movement that ended the genocide – does not tolerate opposition, challenge, or criticism,” the campaign group said.
The Kagame government has more recently faced scrutiny for allegedly using spyware to monitor political dissidents living in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
In 2019 at least six dissidents connected to Rwanda were warned by WhatsApp that they had been targeted by spyware made by the NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company that sells its software to governments, in a targeted attack that affected hundreds of users around the world over a two-week period from April to May that year.
The Rwandans, including Rukundo in Leeds, were among those who were warned that their accounts had been targeted fafter the discovery of a vulnerability in the popular messaging service.
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the news in October 2019, other alleged targets connected to Rwanda have included a journalist living in exile in Uganda, who petitioned the government in Kampala to help protect Rwandans in the country from assassination.
There was also a senior member of the Rwanda National Congress, an opposition group in exile, and an army officer who fled the country in 2008 and testified against members of the Rwandan government in a French court in 2017. The Rwandan government declined to comment on those allegations at the time.
The NSO Group, which does not reveal the names of its clients, has said it has no knowledge of how governments use its spyware, meant for tracking terrorists and criminals. It has also denied allegations raised in a lawsuit by WhatsApp in the US that it played any role in carrying out the attempted infiltrations in 2019.
The company has declined to comment on the case of Rusesabagina and on questions about whether it highlighted the possible abuse of spyware by the Kagame government. There is no evidence that the NSO Group’s software was used to monitor Rusesabagina.
Some experts said they believed that Rwanda probably used a host of surveillance techniques to monitor dissidents.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who closely monitors the use of spyware, said the Rwandan case suggested that there was a “troubling nexus” between the use of spyware and targeted violence.
He said: “In Rwanda the use of spyware technology, like in many other cases, is a way for states to extend the threat that they pose to dissenters outside of their borders. It used to be you could be a dissenter and put some physical distance between yourself and a government. You wouldn’t face the same threat. Well, there’s a lot of talk that Rwanda is conducting operations outside of its borders and that there have been assassinations and assassination attempts.”
A spokesman for the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB), Thierry Murangira, told CNN that he would not go into details about how and where Rusesabagina was apprehended. “This was done with international cooperation subject to an international arrest warrant.”
However, a UAE official told the broadcaster that there was no extradition agreement between the Gulf state and Rwanda.
Rusesabagina’s family told CNN that they believed he was kidnapped, but did not have proof. His son, Trésor, said they had last heard from their father on Thursday, after his arrival in the UAE.
The Rwandan government has always denied accusations of involvement in extra-judicial killings or abductions overseas.
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Jason Burke