In Ohio, United States, a Rwandan man was arrested and accused of lying during court testimony to hide his involvement in the Rwandan genocide, which occurred in the East African country in 1994. In 2019 the arrested man, Eric Tabaro Nshimiye, had testified in the trial of Jean Leonard Teganya, who was later convicted of participating in the genocide. According to US authorities, Nshimiye gave false testimony to hide his crimes, which include killing people with spiked clubs and machetes.
Nshimiye has lived in the United States for almost 30 years: he went to Kenya after leaving Rwanda in 1994. There, according to the charges against him, he lied to US officials to obtain refugee status, even though he was not entitled to it, and move to the United States, where he arrived in 1995.
The Rwandan genocide took place within 100 days in 1994: armed groups of the Hutu ethnic group, the largest, carried out bloody and indiscriminate massacres against the Tutsi minority, but also against political opponents and “moderate” Hutus. It is estimated that from 7 April to mid-July 1994 at least 800 thousand people were killed; there were also tens of thousands of rapes and children conscripted as soldiers. The search for the culprits has been particularly long and in some cases is still ongoing.
– Read also: The day the genocide began in Rwanda