The former medical student served time in the US for lying to get asylum. Now Rwanda says it will try him for genocide and crimes against humanity.
A Rwandan man jailed in the United States for lying about his role in the 1994 genocide has been sent back home. Rwanda’s National Public Prosecution Authority (NPPA) confirmed that Jean Léonard Teganya who is 55 years old, landed at Kigali International Airport on the evening of Monday November 9, escorted by US security officers. He was handed over to prosecutors and re-arrested.
The genocide began in April 1994. Over about 100 days, some 800,000 people most of them from the minority Tutsi community, were killed. More than three decades later, Rwanda is still chasing suspects who fled abroad. According to the NPPA, Teganya is the eighth genocide fugitive deported to Rwanda from the United States since 2007.
Teganya was born in 1971 and was a medical student at the National University of Rwanda in Butare when the killings began. He was also training at the University Teaching Hospital of Butare. He left Rwanda in July 1994 and travelled through what was then Zaire (now the DR Congo), Kenya and India before reaching Canada in 1999.
Canada rejected his asylum claim in 2002 and again in 2012. After about 15 years of proceedings, he avoided a deportation order and walked across the border into the United States near Houlton, Maine on August 3, 2014. He then applied for asylum there.
It is important to be clear on this point: Teganya was not tried for genocide in the United States. He was tried for lying. US prosecutors said he hid his political links and activities during the genocide when he asked for asylum. In April 2019, a federal jury in Boston found him guilty of two counts of immigration fraud and three counts of perjury. He was sentenced to 97 months in prison that July, an appeal court upheld the verdict and sentence in May 2021.
During that trial, prosecutors laid out serious accusations. According to the US Department of Justice, evidence showed he was linked to the then ruling party, the MRND, and its Interahamwe militia. Prosecutors said he led soldiers and militia members through the Butare hospital to hunt for Tutsi patients and refugees, that those found were taken away and killed behind the maternity ward. They also presented evidence linking him to the killing of three Tutsi people and the raping of two women who had sought shelter at the hospital. These are accusations made in court. The jury was not asked to convict him of them, Teganya has denied any part in the genocide.
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