Boston, Massachusetts: Federal Jury Convicts Eric Nshimiye of Lying About His Role in the Rwandan Genocide

A federal jury in Boston convicted Eric Nshimiye on Tuesday of perjury and obstruction of justice, finding that he lied during a 2019 criminal trial in the same city as part of a long effort to conceal his involvement in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Reuters reported the verdict from Boston on Wednesday. Nshimiye, 54, is scheduled to be sentenced on January 26, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Leah Foley. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

The man and the case

Nshimiye was born in Rwanda and has lived in the United States since 1995, when he was admitted as a refugee, Reuters reported. At the time of his arrest in 2024, he was living in Uniontown, Ohio, and working as an engineer for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. A federal grand jury in Boston indicted him in 2024 on four counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice, and one count of engaging in a scheme to conceal material information from federal authorities, according to the Justice Department. The indictment alleged a scheme running back nearly three decades.

He was first arrested and charged by criminal complaint on March 21, 2024, the Justice Department said, and he appeared in federal court in the Northern District of Ohio before his case moved to Boston.

What prosecutors told two Boston juries

Prosecutors said Nshimiye falsified and concealed information about himself to hide his part in the massacre carried out by the hard line Hutu regime in 1994, in which an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed over three months. Citing witnesses, prosecutors alleged that when the violence broke out, Nshimiye was in Butare, in southern Rwanda, where he had been attending university as a medical student alongside his classmate Jean Leonard Teganya.

Prosecutors said both men belonged to the National Revolutionary Movement for Development, the ruling Hutu dominated party that helped perpetrate the genocide. They alleged that Nshimiye attacked Tutsis during the violence and handed Tutsis over to be raped or killed. At the opening of his own trial in Boston in October, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Looney put the allegation to the jury directly, saying Nshimiye himself attacked Tutsis and handed them over to be killed and raped, as Al Jazeera reported at the time. The 2024 indictment went further in its allegations, saying he took part in killings with a nail studded club and a machete. Those were allegations in the indictment, presented by prosecutors, and the charges he was convicted of this week are perjury and obstruction of justice.

The 2019 testimony at the center of the verdict

Nshimiye testified as a defense witness in Teganya's 2019 trial in Boston, an immigration fraud case against a former classmate who was also accused of taking part in the atrocities. Under oath, he denied participating in the genocide and denied being a member of the ruling party. Prosecutors in the new case said those denials were false, and that he had also denied living in Butare during the genocide, saying he was in Kigali, the capital.

Teganya was convicted of perjury and visa fraud charges in 2019 and was sentenced later that year to more than eight years in prison, Reuters reported. Nshimiye's own position, as he gave it in 2019, was that he had gone to Kigali on holiday before the violence broke out and never made it back to Butare, leaving the country instead as a refugee. The jury in Boston this week rejected the account he gave under oath in 2019, and sentencing follows on January 26.