Berlin - A senior Rwandan official, Rose Kabuye, was in German custody in Frankfurt Monday after she was detained on arrival at Frankfurt international airport under an arrest warrant issued in France.

A spokeswoman for state prosecutors in Frankfurt handling the case said she had denied the two accusations of murder and membership in a terrorist association.

She has been wanted for questioning since November 2006 in connection with the April 6, 1994 killing of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana.

Kabuye, 47, is chief of protocol to Rwandan President Paul Kagame and a leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Rwanda broke off diplomatic relations with France after the warrant was issued by magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

Diplomatic sources in Berlin said Germany warned earlier this month more than once that it would arrest her under the warrant if she travelled to Frankfurt.

Police acting on the warrant took her into custody on Sunday at the airport, the German Foreign Ministry said. She appeared the same day before a German magistrate.

Bruguiere last year issued warrants for the arrest of nine Kagame staff and recommended that a UN tribunal on genocide in Rwanda investigate Kagame himself.

Habyarimana was in a plane that was shot down as it was returning to Rwanda in 1994, the year of genocidal bloodletting in the African nation.

In summer this year, Rwandan authorities issued an investigative report that accused France of assisting the genocide in 1994. It claimed France trained Hutu militiamen who subsequently killed 800,000 of the Tutsi ethnic group and Hutu moderates in the bloodbath.

Rwanda has said it will seek to have French politicians hauled before the UN tribunal. Foreign Minister Tharcisse Karugarama said at the time, "This is not a matter of revenge, but of bringing out the truth."

French commentators rejected the report as a bid to divert attention from the suspicions against Kagame. (dpa)