She was the centre of a powerful clique of northern Hutus called akazu (Kinyarwanda for "little house"), an informal organization of Hutu extremists whose members contributed strongly to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
[4] On 9 April 1994, immediately following Habyarimana's assassination and the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, she was airlifted out of Rwanda by French troops and arrived in Paris 8 days later.
In this exodus she was accompanied by thirty other members of the akazu, including Ferdinand Nahimana, director of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines.
Upon arrival in Paris, she received a gift of F 230,000 from the French government, from a budget allocated for "urgent assistance for Rwandan refugees".
[7] In August 2021, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled "inadmissible" the request for dismissal of Agathe Habyarimana, suspected of being involved in the genocide committed against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and targeted by an investigation in France since 2008.