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Rwanda’s government said Saturday will free prison inmate Paul Rusesabagina, the man who inspired the 2004 film Rwandan hotels and that in 2021 he had been convicted of terrorism in very unclear circumstances. Paul Rusesabagina is 68 years old and is known for having saved a thousand people during the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994, hiding them in the luxurious hotel that he ran in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, a story that was later told in the film.
Rusesabagina was arrested in 2020 on terrorism charges, backed by the authoritarian rule of President Paul Kagame. At the time of his arrest he hadn’t lived in Rwanda for years: he had left the country in 1996 and had gone to live first in Belgium and then in the United States. He was on a plane from the United Arab Emirates that was supposed to take him to Burundi to attend a conference, but the plane was diverted by the government of Rwanda to Kigali.
A trial against him had therefore begun, in which he was accused of being guilty of having founded a terrorist organization responsible for some attacks against civilians in which 9 people died in 2018.
Rusesabagina’s lawyers had argued that the trial was politically motivated by Rusesabagina’s criticism of Kagame’s rule, and that there was no evidence of links between Rusesabagina and the terrorists. The trial was highly criticized by the United States, where Rusesabagina regularly resided: in September 2021 he ended up with a 25-year prison sentence. Rwandan government sources told the agency Reuters that on Saturday Rusesabagina will first be transferred to Qatar and from there he will then take a plane back to the United States.