Rwandan convicted for lying about genocide role

A federal jury in Boston, Massachusetts, has convicted a Rwandan American man of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, reports Al Jazeera. Eric Nshimiye, a 55-year-old father of four and a US citizen, was accused of lying in his testimony in a 2019 trial, also in Boston, for Jean Teganya, a former medical school roommate who was later convicted of helping to perpetrate the genocide. At the time, Nshimiye told the court neither he nor his friend had taken part in the killing and rape of Tutsis in Butare, where the pair was studying at a medical university. Investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security arrested Nshimiye at his home in Ohio in 2024, alleging he had lied to them in an interview about his time in Rwanda during the genocide. Nshimiye was originally charged with multiple counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and committing fraud on his immigration paperwork because prosecutors said he had told immigration officials he did not take part in the genocide when he moved to the US several years after the violence. He became a US citizen in 2009. The immigration charge was dropped by prosecutors before the trial began. On Tuesday, the jury convicted Nshimiye on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. After the verdict, Nshimiye’s attorneys filed a request with the court to count the time he had already spent in prison before the trial towards any sentence. In a court filing, the attorneys argued Nshimiye should be set free because the two and a half years he had already spent in custody were longer than the usual sentence for the charges he was convicted of.

Full Al Jazeera report