A federal court in Boston, Massachusetts, has begun hearing the case against a Rwandan-American man accused of hiding his part in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Prosecutors say Eric Nshimiye, a 55-year-old father of four and a US citizen, joined a nationwide wave of violence against the ethnic minority Tutsis, carried out by majority Hutu extremists in April 1994. The United Nations has described the killings as a genocide, and more than 800,000 people were killed over roughly 100 days.
The trial opened on Tuesday, with prosecutors presenting their account of Nshimiye’s actions during the violence. Defence lawyers gave their own version of events on the same day, setting up a sharply contested case.
Allegations of lies to investigators and false testimony
Investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security arrested Nshimiye at his home in Ohio in 2024. They allege he lied to them in an interview about his time in Rwanda during the genocide. Authorities also allege that he committed perjury at a 2019 trial in Boston, where he testified for a friend who was also accused of taking part in the genocide.
Prosecutors say Nshimiye was a medical student in the town of Butare at the time and that he personally took part in the killing and rape of Tutsis. Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Looney told the court on Tuesday that Hutus who carried out the violence had responded to government calls to kill their neighbours, and that Nshimiye was among them. “He himself attacked Tutsis, and handed Tutsis over to be killed and raped,” Looney said.
Nshimiye faces charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over his denials. During his 2019 testimony, he said he had not been part of the genocide and had no links to the pro-Hutu National Revolutionary Movement for Development or the Interahamwe, a paramilitary group blamed for most of the killings. If he is convicted, the Trump administration could move to revoke his citizenship.
Defence argues identifications rely on contested eyewitnesses
Nshimiye, who is an ethnic Hutu, has told the court that he travelled to the capital, Kigali, on holiday shortly before the violence began. He says he never returned to Butare because of the chaos that engulfed the country in April 1994. Instead, he left Rwanda as a refugee and eventually settled in the US, becoming a citizen in 2009.
Defence lawyers told the court that Nshimiye was not among the Hutus who took part in the genocide. They argue that the prosecution’s case rests entirely on eyewitness accounts. Some witnesses, they said, could identify him only after being shown his photograph repeatedly, and some have given different testimony in earlier genocide trials over the years.
Kurt Kerns, one of the defence attorneys, told the court that the evidence against Nshimiye had surfaced only after he testified as a character witness, and 25 years after the genocide. Kerns also said Nshimiye had never been implicated by domestic or international tribunals that dealt with the genocide. Those bodies include the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and gacaca, an informal community-based justice system that tried more than a million people for their role in the atrocity.
Family says the 1994 events were more complex
Nshimiye’s family rejects the idea that the events of 1994 can be reduced to Hutus killing Tutsis. His nephew, Epa Bizimana, told that being an ethnic Hutu alone should not be enough to persuade a jury that someone took part in the genocide. Bizimana, who was 10 years old when he fled Rwanda with his family in 1994, said the trial would bring new information to the court and to the American public.
“The jury is going to learn some things for the first time; Americans are going to learn something for the first time,” Bizimana said.
Since his arrest, authorities have held Nshimiye without bail in a federal jail in the Boston area. At the opening of the case, he wore a dark blue suit and appeared calm, turning occasionally to smile at family and friends who had come to support him. Prosecutors plan to call more than a dozen witnesses, most of them flown in from Rwanda. Some say they saw him take part in pro-Hutu political events before the genocide, and others say they later saw him join genocidal violence in Butare.
