US jury convicts Rwandan American of lying about role in genocide

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.

Eric Nshimiye, a 55-year-old father of four and a United States citizen, was accused of lying in his testimony in a 2019 trial, also in Boston, for Jean Leonard 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 were 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.

“For nearly three decades, this defendant concealed his involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the heinous acts of violence he committed, including clubbing people to death,” Assistant Attorney General A Tysen Duva in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division said in a statement on Wednesday. “Then, he lied to immigration officials in order to become a US citizen, and he lied to a federal jury to protect himself and a fellow perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide.”

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.

Nshimiye’s family, including his US-born children, were in attendance when the verdict was announced in court.

“It was quite shocking, difficult to process at first because we were expecting a different outcome. We were expecting to bring him home,” his son Tresor Nshimiye, told Al Jazeera.

Prosecutors brought a series of experts to help the jury understand the scope of the crimes in Rwanda, starting with academics who pointed out where the country was on a map of Africa.

Witnesses from Rwanda told jurors they recalled Nshimiye taking part in killings and other violence in Butare directed at minority Tutsis in 1994. They were part of a nationwide outbreak of genocidal violence by hardline majority Hutus that killed more than 800,000 people over about 100 days. Others said Nshimiye was part of the pro-Hutu National Revolutionary Movement for Development and the Interahamwe, the paramilitary group blamed for most of the killings during the genocide.

The defence argued Nshimiye had never been implicated in domestic and international tribunals after the genocide, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as well as an informal transitional justice system inside Rwanda, called gacaca, which tried more than a million people for their roles in the atrocities.

Defence lawyers pointed out apparent inconsistencies in government witnesses’ testimonies and brought other witnesses who said Nshimiye was with them in the capital, Kigali, and other parts of the country during the genocide.

Nshimiye’s attorneys also argued in court that Rwandan authorities had interfered with the investigation because they had met with some witnesses before they testified in Boston.

“At the end of the day, it was just two competing stories, and so much is lost with this all happening 30 years or so ago. … I guess the jury was more convinced of the prosecutor’s witnesses because they victimised themselves in their stories,” Tresor Nshimiye said.

Nshimiye’s case is one of several currently under way in the US related to the Rwandan genocide.

In April 2025, prosecutors charged Faustin Nsabumukunzi, a 65-year-old beekeeper in Long Island, New York, who had applied for US citizenship, with similarly concealing his role in the violence. And in June 2025, authorities charged 65-year-old Vincent Nzigiyimfura of Dayton, Ohio, who had also applied for US citizenship, with concealing his role in the genocide.

Both men were previously listed publicly as fugitives by Rwandan authorities.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: aljazeera.com