Kanombe is the oldest airfield in Rwanda on the public record. The historian Bernardin Muzungu, cited by Wikipedia, dates the first aircraft landing there to 1934, when Rwanda was a Belgian-administered territory. After independence in 1962 the airport took the name of the first president, Grégoire Kayibanda, and it kept that name until after the genocide, when it became Kigali International Airport.

The small air arm that Rwanda built after independence with Belgian help, with three ex-French Magister jet trainers and an Islander as its first aircraft according to Wikipedia, had no other airfield of any size to use, and Kanombe military camp lies on the edge of the airport. Exactly which aircraft were based here in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and in what numbers, is not documented in an official source; the Rwandan Air Force has published no history of its own.

Civil traffic has grown fast since the war. Wikipedia, citing official and press figures, gives 145,189 passengers in 2008 and about 1.2 million in 2019. Because the site is hemmed in by the city, Rwanda is building a replacement at Bugesera, south of Kigali; in December 2019 Qatar Airways agreed to take a 60 per cent stake in the project, with a planned investment of US$818 million.

When the Rwandan Patriotic Front crossed from Uganda at the start of October 1990, France launched Operation Noroît. According to the French Wikipedia article, citing the French parliamentary information mission on Rwanda, its task was to protect Europeans and French installations and to control the aerodrome so that French and other foreigners could be evacuated. Some 300 troops were deployed at first; by December the commander judged that one company was enough, but a French presence lasted until December 1993.

The Rwandan air arm lost aircraft from the first week. The Aviation Safety Network lists a Britten-Norman Islander of the Rwandan Air Force, registered 9XR-GV, lost near Kigali Airport on 8 October 1990; it does not give the cause or the number killed, and no other source for the loss was found. By 1994, according to Wikipedia, most of the air arm’s aircraft had been shot down, destroyed on the ground or lost in crashes.

Shortly before 20:20 local time on 6 April 1994 the presidential Dassault Falcon 50, 9XR-NN, was on final approach to Kigali in clear skies when it was hit by missiles and fell into the gardens of the presidential residence. All 12 on board were killed, among them Presidents Habyarimana and Ntaryamira and the French crew Jacky Héraud, Jean-Pierre Minaberry and Jean-Michel Perrine. A Belgian C-130 bringing UNAMIR troops had been waved off to give the jet priority and diverted to Nairobi; Belgian peacekeepers at the airport were surrounded and disarmed by the Presidential Guard, and UN troops were kept away from the crash site, according to the Wikipedia account.

Responsibility has never been settled in court. A French judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, concluded in 2006 that the RPF leadership was responsible and issued warrants for nine of Paul Kagame’s aides; the accusations were heavily disputed. Rwanda’s Mutsinzi report of 2010, drawing on British ballistics experts, and a French ballistic report made public in January 2012 both identified the area of Kanombe camp, which then housed the Presidential Guard, the para-commandos and the army’s anti-aircraft battalion, as the likely firing point. A Belgian Senate report of 1997 found too little information to decide.

On 8 April France began Operation Amaryllis. About 500 French troops under General Henri Poncet held the airport while foreigners were brought in from the city; the first flight left on 9 April, and by 14 April France had evacuated about 1,400 people and Belgium about 1,200, according to the French Wikipedia article citing the French parliamentary mission, which also recorded criticism that the evacuations were selective. The United Nations estimates that more than one million people were killed in the genocide in about 100 days.