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. 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. 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.
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