President Paul Kagame may have been involved in one of the greatest social media fails of all time

It’s quite unlikely to talk about renown world leaders who are active on social media without mentioning Rwanda’s controversial President, Paul Kagame.

With over  260k followers  and following nobody, @PaulKagame’s stray tweet, according  to The Washington Post, could  have pulled off  the veil regarding so  many controversies.

It all started with a one @RichardGoldston twitter account, who  in rebuttal, to a Radio France International  article about  the killing of political dissidents  within  Rwanda and the  diaspora. Written by  RFI  journalist  Sonia Rolley, the  article received approval of a political scientist with Colby College, Laura Seay. But this time around not in a newspaper article style or white paper but via Twitter –that is in less than 140 characters.

One of the  slurry allegations  in  the tweef  between  Rolley and  Richard was that the former had been a mistress  to Patrick Karegeya, the former head of Rwanda’s intelligence communities who was found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel on 1st Jan. 2014. Karegeya had become one of the most vocal critics of Kagame since falling out with the president in 2007.

Even though  for the past few months, Rolley had been reporting on the death of Patrick Karegeya, many other Twitter users  joined her to counter Richard’s misogynistic rumblings.

After a little back and forth, something strange happened: Kagame himself apparently stepped in, tweeting directly at Terrill (one of the other participants). The tweets have since been deleted, but not before people were able to get a screenshot:

Twitter trolls are two-a-penny, of course, and even if Kagame’s Twitter ghostwriter is really behind the @RichardGoldston account it may look like an embarrassment rather than a scandal. However, the fact that the tweet that started this was a reference to Rolley’s reporting on the death of Rwandan dissidents lends the situation a darker tone.

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Relevant: 6 surprising social media fails of 2013

Twitter screenshot  via The  Washington Post