A confidential "information report" that hints at a United Nations cover-up in the 1994 assassination of Rwanda's president will be made public, the world body's war crimes tribunal for Rwanda said yesterday.

The announcement comes days after Rwanda, whose current president, Paul Kagame, is mentioned in the report as having possibly ordered the assassination, said it doesn't object to the release.

Lawyers representing Rwandans accused in the central African country's genocide have been demanding to see the report since the National Post revealed its existence in a March 1 article. The assassination triggered the genocide, which resulted in at least 500,000 deaths.

The release of the report is significant because the lawyers defending Rwandans accused in the genocide can try to have it entered into evidence as proof that an investigation was underway.

From there, they can call for the results of the investigation, which, they say, will help them show that the mass murder of Tutsis was the result of uncontrollable violence following the assassination, and not a planned genocide.

A Canadian among those lawyers, John Philpot, said yesterday the release of the report was "not enough".

The report, written by a former tribunal investigator in 1997, refers to Louise Arbour, now a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, in the section about the presidential assassination.

It says that Ms. Arbour, then chief prosecutor, shut down an investigation into the assassination after information came to light implicating Mr. Kagame.

Until then, investigators had presumed that Hutu extremists had murdered then-president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, because he had agreed to share power with the country's minority Tutsis.

But the report says that sometime after 1996, three informants told investigators that Mr. Kagame, then military head of a mainly Tutsi rebel group, had ordered the assassination.