Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Looney told the court on Tuesday that Hutus who took part in the violence, including Nshimiye, “heeded calls by the government to terminate their neighbours.” Looney said Nshimiye “himself attacked Tutsis, and handed Tutsis over to be killed and raped.”
Investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security arrested Nshimiye at his home in Ohio in 2024, alleging he lied during an interview about his time in Rwanda during the genocide. They also accuse him of perjury in a 2019 trial in Boston, where he testified on behalf of a friend also accused of perpetrating the genocide. Nshimiye faces charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. If convicted, the Trump administration could seek to revoke his US citizenship.
Nshimiye, an ethnic Hutu, denies the allegations. He says he was on holiday in the capital, Kigali, when violence broke out in April 1994 and never made it back to the town of Butare, where he was a medical student. He claims he left Rwanda as a refugee and eventually came to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2009.
At the opening of his case, Nshimiye was dressed in a dark blue suit and appeared calm, occasionally turning to smile at family and friends in the courtroom. Authorities have held him without bail in a Boston-area federal jail since his arrest.
Prosecutors plan to call more than a dozen witnesses, most flown in from Rwanda, who say they recall seeing Nshimiye participate in pro-Hutu political events before the genocide and later engage in genocidal violence in Butare. His family argues that the events of 1994 are more complex than the simple narrative presented by prosecutors, according to the Al Jazeera report.
More than 800,000 people were killed over about 100 days in the genocide against the Tutsi by extremist Hutus, which the United Nations has formally recognised as genocide.