Jean-Pierre told General Dallaire’s aides in January 1994 that he had been instructed to register “all Tutsis” living in Kigali, apparently for “their extermination.” He also said that the Rwandan Army had been supplying the Interahamwe with weapons, and identified several arms caches, including one in the headquarters of the ruling party. The Interahamwe went on to commit many of the murders during the genocide.

The Arusha-based international tribunal has found that the Rwandan Army channeled weapons to the Interahamwe and provided military training to militia members. But tribunal judges were not convinced that the purpose of that training was the “extermination” of Tutsis, as Jean-Pierre claimed, rather than preparation for renewed hostilities with the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front. They found that the Interahamwe had drawn up lists of “suspected opponents of the regime,” but such lists were “not focused exclusively on ethnicity.”

Evidence submitted to the tribunal showed that Jean-Pierre may have had other motives for seeking United Nations protection. He had fallen out with party leaders who suspected him of selling arms to rebels in Burundi. Some witnesses believe he might have been an agent of the Rwandan Patriotic Front assigned to penetrate the Interahamwe.

While there is no reliable evidence to back the claim that he was an R.P.F. agent in January 1994, it is clear that he had connections to opposition parties allied with the Tutsi-led rebels. According to United Nations cables, a Hutu opposition leader named Faustin Twagiramungu served as Jean-Pierre’s conduit to General Dallaire. These connections caused French and Belgian analysts to suspect that Jean-Pierre might be spreading “disinformation.”

In his 2003 memoir, “Shake Hands With the Devil,” General Dallaire raised the possibility that his informant had “simply melted back into the Interahamwe, angry and disillusioned at our vacillation and ineffectiveness, and become a genocidaire.” Jean-Pierre told the general’s aides at their final meeting in February 1994 that he was planning to go to Zaire, for “commando training.”

Instead, he went to Tanzania where he joined the R.P.F., according to his wife. In late March, two weeks before the president’s assassination, he moved to a rebel-held enclave in northern Rwanda, where he was reported to be “in very good books with senior members of the R.P.F.” In late 1994, a minister in Rwanda’s new Tutsi-led government informed the family that Jean-Pierre had been “killed in battle.”

The circumstances of his death remain a mystery. As his wife told investigators, “I do not know how he died and where.” She was unable even to establish whether he was “surely dead.”