US Opens Trial of Rwandan-American Accused of Concealing Genocide Role

Boston, Massachusetts, US – A US federal court in Boston has begun hearing the trial of a Rwandan-American accused of concealing his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

According to the indictment, Eric Nshimiye, 55, a father of four and now a US citizen, took part in the wave of genocidal violence against the Tutsi minority carried out by Hutu extremists in April 1994. More than 800,000 people were killed over roughly 100 days in what the United Nations calls a genocide.

Investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security arrested Nshimiye at his home in Ohio in 2024, accusing him of lying to them during questioning about his time in Rwanda during the genocide. They also allege he committed perjury at an earlier trial in Boston in 2019, when he testified for a friend also accused of involvement in the genocide. Prosecutors say Nshimiye, then a medical student in the town of Butare, directly took part in the killing and rape of Tutsis.

Addressing the court on Tuesday, Assistant US Attorney Christopher Looney said Hutus who joined the violence "followed their government's call to exterminate their neighbours", including Nshimiye.

"He attacked Tutsis himself, and handed Tutsis over to others to be killed and raped," Looney said.

In his 2019 testimony, Nshimiye denied taking part in the genocide and said he did not belong to the Hutu-backed National Revolutionary Movement for Development or the Interahamwe militia, the force blamed for most of the killings during the genocide.

Those denials leave Nshimiye facing charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. If convicted, the Trump administration could seek to revoke his citizenship.

Nshimiye, an ethnic Hutu, says he travelled to the capital Kigali for a holiday before the violence erupted. He says he could not return to Butare because of the chaos that engulfed the country in April 1994, and instead left as a refugee, eventually reaching the United States and becoming a citizen in 2009.

At Tuesday's opening session, Nshimiye, wearing a dark blue suit, appeared calm and occasionally turned to smile at family and friends who came to support him. Since his arrest, authorities have held Nshimiye without bail at a federal prison in the Boston area.

Prosecutors are expected to call more than a dozen witnesses, most flown in from Rwanda, who say they remember seeing Nshimiye at pro-Hutu political events before the genocide, and some of whom say they later saw him take part in the genocidal violence in Butare.

His family argues that the events of 1994 were more complex than a simple story of Hutus killing Tutsis. Epa Bizimana, Nshimiye's nephew, told Al Jazeera that being an ethnic Hutu should not by itself be enough to convince a jury that someone took part in the genocide.

"The jury will learn some things for the first time; Americans will learn some things for the first time," said Bizimana, who was 10 years old when he left Rwanda with his family in 1994.

Defence lawyers told the court on Tuesday that Nshimiye was not among the Hutus who took part in the genocide. They argue the entire case against him is built on witness accounts, some of whom could only identify him after being shown his photograph repeatedly, and some of whom have a history of giving varying testimony at trials of alleged genocide suspects over the years.

Kurt Kerns, one of the defence lawyers, told the court that the prosecution's case rests on evidence that "only surfaced after Eric came to testify as a character witness, and 25 years after the genocide".

Kerns said Nshimiye had never been implicated in domestic or international courts after the genocide, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Rwanda's informal domestic transitional justice system known as gacaca, which tried more than a million people for their roles in the tragedy.