US jury finds Nshimiye guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice — Al Jazeera

A federal jury in Boston, Massachusetts, found 55-year-old Rwandan-born US citizen Eric Nshimiye guilty on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, Al Jazeera reports.

Testimony in the Teganya case

According to the prosecution, Nshimiye lied during the 2019 trial of Jean Leonard Teganya, his former roommate at medical university. Teganya was later convicted of aiding and abetting genocide. At the time, Nshimiye stated that neither he nor Teganya had taken part in the killings and rapes of Tutsis in Butare, where they studied.

In 2024, investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security detained Nshimiye at his home in Ohio. According to the prosecution, he also lied to them while discussing his time in Rwanda during the genocide. Nshimiye moved to the United States several years after the violence and became a US citizen in 2009.

He was initially also charged with immigration document fraud because, according to prosecutors, he denied involvement in the genocide to immigration officials. The prosecution dropped that charge before the trial began.

More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.

Positions of the parties

Witnesses from Rwanda told jurors that they remembered Nshimiye taking part in killings and other violence against Tutsis in Butare in 1994. Other witnesses said he belonged to the pro-Hutu National Revolutionary Movement for Development and the Interahamwe paramilitary group.

The defense insisted that Nshimiye had not been a subject of national and international trials after the genocide, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the gacaca justice system. The lawyers also pointed to inconsistencies in eyewitness testimony and presented testimony from people who said Nshimiye had been in Kigali and other parts of the country.

Motion for release

After the verdict was announced, Nshimiye's lawyers asked the court to credit toward any possible sentence the two and a half years he has already spent in custody. They said that period exceeds the usual sentence for the crimes of which he was found guilty and asked for the defendant to be released.