François Ngeze was presented as the new President of Burundi by the army, but the coup failed under domestic and international pressure, leaving Prime Minister Sylvie Kinigi in charge of the government.

The exact identity of those who led the plot remains unknown, though Ngeze, Army Chief of Staff Jean Bikomagu, ex-President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, and Buyoya are widely suspected to have been involved.

Faced with these challenges, in the afternoon of 23 October Bikomagu ordered the army to return to its barracks, and two days later Kinigi's government announced the abrogation of all emergency measures declared by the putschists.

Attempts by the National Assembly to elect a successor to Ndadaye were stifled by the Tutsi-dominated Constitutional Court, though the body eventually succeed in selecting Cyprien Ntaryamira as President of Burundi in January 1994.

Facing substantial foreign pressure, Buyoya initiated reforms designed to end Burundi's systemic ethnic violence,[5] while UPRONA attempted to incorporate more Hutus into its ranks.

"[10] A plot from a handful of officers discovered on 3 July to seize Ndadaye's residence failed due to a lack of support from other components of the military, resulting in several arrests, including that of its suspected leader, Lieutenant Colonel Slyvestre Ningaba, who had been chef de cabinet for Buyoya.

Politically, Ndadaye's government reexamined several contracts and economic concessions made the by the previous regime, posing a threat to Tutsi elite business interests.

The army was due to open its annual recruitment drive in November, and there were fears among some Tutsi soldiers that this process would be altered in a way that would threaten their dominance of the institution.

[24] American diplomat Bob Krueger considered Buyoya to be the person chiefly responsible for the coup,[25] as did Lieutenant Jean-Paul Kamana and Commandant Hilaire Ntakiyica, two soldiers who admitted to partaking in minor roles in the plot.

Instead of informing the president about the vague threat his wife had learned of, he told him that he felt it strange that UPRONA, the Tutsi-dominated opposition party, was denouncing the government's popular policy of allowing thousands of Burundian refugees to return to the country before the commune elections in December.

Ntakije said that this would not be possible due to the objections of prison officials to transferring detainees at nighttime, but he assured the president that he would station an additional armoured car at the Presidential Palace for extra security.

Shortly before 01:00 on 21 October, Ntakije called the president and told him that armoured cars had left Camp Muha for an unknown destination and advised him to leave the palace immediately.

[38] According to political scientist René Lemarchand, the palace guards offered sustained resistance to the attack until several of them defected to the increasing number of putschists and the rest gave up.

[47] Minister of Home Affairs and Communal Development Juvénal Ndayikeza called the provincial governors before telephoning Patin to ask him for refuge in the United States embassy.

[55] Shortly before dawn, Ngendahayo scaled the wall at Ramboux's residence and went to the neighbouring home, which belonged to his brother and was also where Minister of Refugee Repatriation Léonard Nyangoma was staying.

Ndadaye reentered the armoured car with Gakoryo to finalise their understanding on paper, but when the secretary of state exited the vehicle soldiers began shouting for the president to come out.

Minister of Health Jean Minani was in Kigali at the time of the takeover, and delivered a message through the station, appealing to Burundians to resist the coup[9] and calling for international armed intervention to protect the civilian government.

[71] Early in the morning on 21 October François Ngeze, a Hutu UPRONA member of the National Assembly and former Minister of Interior under Buyoya, was brought to Camp Para in Bujumbura.

[68] At about 21:00, he introduced himself to the public in a television broadcast as President of the Conseil National de Salut Public—a body which did not exist—and announced the displacement of the governors among other actions as measures meant to "manage the crisis".

[76] The United Nations International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi determined in 1996 that "circumstantial evidence is sufficient to warrant the conclusion" that some FRODEBU leaders had anticipated the possibility of an army coup attempt and disseminated plans for armed resistance and hostage-taking.

[91] Political scientist Filip Reyntjens described the coup as "the most successful failed military take-over" in African history,[92] and largely attributed its failure to popular domestic resistance.

"[94] According to Lemarchand, the coup was a "watershed event" which "destroyed a nascent interethnic consensus" and "undid in a few hours what a democratic transition begun five years earlier had so painstakingly tried to accomplish".

[93] Academic Alexandre Hatungimana wrote that the killing of Ndadaye "opened a constitutional void that neither the army, divided on the military coup, nor the political parties of the opposition, weakened by their defeat in the election, nor civil society, paralyzed by the violence that took hold of nearly all the hilltops in the country, were able to fill".

[96] Economist Léonce Ndikumana argued that, "Unlike earlier ethnic conflicts [...] the crisis that followed the October 1993 military coup has been longer, bloodier, and has affected the entire country.

[99] The killing of Ndadaye and the flight of 300,000 Hutu refugees to Rwanda during the violence crystallised anti-Tutsi sentiment among Hutus there and greatly troubled the prospects of the Arusha Accords power-sharing agreement designed to end the Rwandan Civil War.

[105] The deaths of Ndadaye, Karibwami, and Bimazubute eliminated the constitutionally-delineated presidential line of succession,[106] and left Kinigi, the highest-ranking civilian official to survive the putsch,[88] the de facto head of state of Burundi.

[68] According to Reyntjens, the failure of the October putsch led its perpetrators to opt for a "creeping coup", eroding FRODEBU's legitimacy and establishing a constitutional order that favored their aims.

Reyntjens described the convention as "the institutional translation of the October 1993 coup: the constitution [had] been shelved and the outcome of both the presidential and parliamentary elections swept aside as the president and parliament [were] placed under the tutelage of an unconstitutional body".

[131] The commission concluded in its 1996 report that "the coup was carried out by officers highly placed in the line of command of the Burundian Army" but that it was "not in a position to identify the persons that should be brought to justice for this crime".

[134] Buyoya, who was abroad at the time serving as an envoy for the African Union, denounced the proceedings as "a political trial conducted in a scandalous manner" and resigned from his diplomatic position "in order to have full freedom to defend myself and clear my name".