Juvenal Habyarimana

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda was hit by two anti-aircraft missiles, crashing the plane and killing him and nine others. But that was only the beginning of the violence. Rumors flew that Paul Kagame, a political rival and member of the Tutsi ethnic group, engineered the attack, and many Tutsis were killed in retaliation, setting off a holocaust. Many Rwandans insist that the President's own supporters engineered the murder as an excuse to exterminated the Tutsis.