A former senior Rwandan official has testified that France was complicit in the 1994 genocide which killed at least 800,000 people.

Speaking at a public hearing into allegations that France helped facilitate the 100-day killing spree 12 years ago, Jacques Bihozagara, a former Rwandan ambassador to France, said that Paris had supported the perpetrators with arms and training.

France has denied any role in the massacre, in which majority Hutu extremists attacked minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

"The French sent troops, weapons, trained killers and manned roadblocks to facilitate murderers in achieving their mission of exterminating Tutsis," Mr Bihozagara told the government-appointed commission.

Mr Bihozagara, a founding member of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), said that French policy was at the time driven by concerns about losing influence in Africa and that Paris opposed the Tutsi-led rebel group because of its ties to Uganda, an English-speaking former British protectorate.

"France conducted a denigration and demonisation campaign against the RPF and its leaders," he told the panel. "They thought a francophone country was being attacked by an Anglophone country…[and believed] they had to rush to the rescue."

He said that French officials had warned the RPF to stop its fight, quoting them as saying: "You will reach Kigali to only find all your relatives perished."

Mr Bihozagara is the first of 25 witnesses due to appear at the hearings over the next week as the commission – consisting of historians, legal experts and a senior military officer in the former Rwandan army - weighs whether Rwanda should sue France for genocide-related damages at the International Court of Justice.

The RPF, now the country’s ruling party, claims that France backed the government of Rwanda’s former President Juvenal Habyarimana by providing military training for government forces despite knowing that some within the leadership were planning to use the troops to commit genocide. The panel has been working since April to examine the allegations.

In three hours of testimony in the Kinyarwanda language, Mr Bihozagara questioned France’s motive in leading a UN military and humanitarian mission - known as Operation Turquoise - in the last two months of the genocide.

"Operation Turquoise was aimed only at protecting genocide perpetrators, because the genocide continued even within the Turquoise zone," he said.

French soldiers were deployed to southwestern Rwanda to set up and secure a protective humanitarian zone but have been accused of allowing radical Hutus to enter Tutsi camps.

Jean de Dieu Mucyo, chairman of the commission and former Rwandan justice minister, has said the panel will finish its work within six months, having been given a six month extension in its mandate earlier this month. "This is an important inquiry that should be witnessed by everyone interested in this important episode of our history," he said.

A French military tribunal is conducting a separate enquiry into claims by six Rwandan Tutsis accusing French troops of being complicit in genocide. A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said that "strategic errors" had been made.

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