US jury convicts Rwandan American of lying about role in genocide
Jurors heard competing witness testimony on where Eric Nshimiye was and what he was doing in April 1994.
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.
“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.