US Jury Convicts Rwandan American of Perjury Over 1994 Genocide Testimony

A federal jury in Boston, Massachusetts, has found a Rwandan American man guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice, ruling that he lied about his part in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Eric Nshimiye, 55, is a father of four and a United States citizen. He was convicted on Tuesday of four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. The charges stem from testimony he gave at a 2019 trial, also in Boston, of Jean Leonard Teganya, a former medical school roommate who was later convicted of helping carry out the genocide. At that trial, Nshimiye told the court that neither he nor Teganya had taken part in the killing and rape of Tutsis in Butare, where the two were studying at a medical university.

US Department of Homeland Security investigators 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. He was first charged with several counts of perjury and obstruction, along with fraud on his immigration paperwork. Prosecutors had said he told immigration officials he did not take part in the genocide when he moved to the US several years after the violence. He became a US citizen in 2009. Prosecutors dropped the immigration charge before the trial began.

In a statement on Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General A Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said the defendant had hidden his involvement for nearly three decades, "including clubbing people to death." He added that Nshimiye "lied to immigration officials in order to become a US citizen, and he lied to a federal jury to protect himself and a fellow perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide."

Prosecutors called a series of experts to explain the scale of the crimes to jurors, starting with academics who showed where Rwanda sits on a map of Africa. Witnesses from Rwanda said they remembered Nshimiye taking part in killings and other violence against Tutsis in Butare in 1994. The attacks were part of a nationwide wave of violence by hardline Hutus that killed more than 800,000 people in about 100 days. Other witnesses said he belonged to the pro-Hutu National Revolutionary Movement for Development and to the Interahamwe, the paramilitary group blamed for most of the killings.

The defence noted that Nshimiye had never been implicated by domestic or international tribunals after the genocide. These included the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the gacaca system, an informal transitional justice process inside Rwanda that tried more than a million people. His lawyers pointed to apparent inconsistencies in the testimony of government witnesses and called other witnesses who said he was with them in the capital, Kigali, and elsewhere in the country during the genocide. They also argued that Rwandan authorities had interfered with the investigation by meeting some witnesses before they testified in Boston.

After the verdict, Nshimiye's attorneys asked the court to credit the time he has already spent in custody toward any sentence. In a filing, they argued he should be released because the two and a half years he has served exceed the usual sentence for the offences of which he was convicted.

His family, including his US-born children, was in court for the verdict. His son Tresor Nshimiye told Al Jazeera it was "quite shocking, difficult to process at first because we were expecting a different outcome. We were expecting to bring him home." He described the trial as "just two competing stories," with much lost over roughly 30 years, and said the jury seemed more persuaded by prosecution witnesses "because they victimised themselves in their stories."

The case is one of several related to the Rwandan genocide now under way in the US. In April 2025, prosecutors charged Faustin Nsabumukunzi, a 65-year-old beekeeper in Long Island, New York, who had applied for citizenship, with concealing his role in the violence. In June 2025, authorities charged Vincent Nzigiyimfura, 65, of Dayton, Ohio, who had also applied for citizenship, with the same. Rwandan authorities had previously listed both men publicly as fugitives.