Rwandan President Paul Kagame yesterday said France "should have tasted our wrath" for what he called their complicity in the central African country's 1994 genocide.
In the latest salvo in a diplomatic war that saw Rwanda cut ties with France last year after a French judge issued arrest warrants for Kagame's top associates, Kagame used a genocide remembrance ceremony to lash out at Paris."If we had time and resources they should have tasted our wrath. I regret that they left without picking up a lesson from Rwanda," he told a crowd of thousands gathered in the southern village of Murambi for the 13th anniversary of the killings.
A French foreign ministry spokesman declined to comment on Kagame's remarks.
Kagame commanded the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a mostly Tutsi rebel group that toppled the Hutu regime largely responsible for the country's 1994 genocide in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.
Some 270 victims of Murambi were buried in a genocide memorial site where 50,000 people were killed.
Mr Murambi was in a zone controlled by the French in the early days of the genocide in a United Nations-sanctioned mission called Operation Turquoise