Rwanda will conduct an objective probe into accusations France helped train killers who took part in the central African nation’s 1994 genocide, the country’s foreign minister said yesterday.

While marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide in April, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told mourners France had helped train fighters knowing that they would commit a genocide. France strongly denies this.

France and Rwanda have long been at odds over the French role in the genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus died in 100 days of ethnic slaughter.

A draft law approved by the Rwandan cabinet on Friday created an independent commission to investigate France’s role. The law must be passed by parliament before the commission can start its work.

“The commission will collect testimony from survivors and from ex-FAR (former army) and Interahamwe who were involved,” Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande told reporters yesterday.

“It will be an objective exercise, we will share the findings with the French government,” he said.

The Interahamwe are Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after they took part in the genocide, and now hide out in eastern Congo.

Murigande denied the move was in retaliation for previous accusations by France over Kagame’s involvement in triggering the killings, saying the two countries were engaged in a process of trying to improve their relations.

Murigande said the commission would hear testimony from both genocide survivors and from perpetrators.

Kagame accused France of taking part in the genocide after the Paris newspaper Le Monde published articles blaming him for ordering the shooting down of the plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana and the Burundian president.

Habyarimana’s death triggered Rwanda’s mass killings and plunged the heart of the continent into a decade of war and upheaval that is only now slowly abating.

The newspaper reports were based on a six-year inquiry by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who was asked to investigate the crash by relatives of the French flight crew.