The United States has deported Jean Léonard Teganya to Rwanda, where prosecutors say he will face trial over alleged genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi — a case that has crossed three countries and more than three decades before reaching the courtroom where the alleged crimes took place.
Source: KT Press
Rwanda's National Public Prosecution Authority (NPPA) said it received Teganya on Monday, November 9, following his deportation from the United States. His plane touched down at Kigali International Airport at around 6 p.m. local time, hours later than the roughly 11 a.m. arrival first expected, KT Press reported. NPPA spokesperson Faustin Nkusi said Teganya is the eighth genocide fugitive to be deported to Rwanda since 2007, and that more indictments involving suspected fugitives remain pending.
Source: Reuters via Sowetan
Teganya has never been tried for genocide. His only convictions are American ones — two counts of immigration fraud and three counts of perjury in Boston in 2019, for concealing his past while seeking asylum. The genocide allegations were evidence in that case; in Rwanda they become the charges themselves, and he is presumed innocent of them until a Rwandan court decides.
What Rwanda alleges happened at Butare hospital
Teganya, born in 1971 in Gatumba Sector, in present-day Ngororero District, was a third-year medical student at the National University of Rwanda in Butare and an intern at the University Hospital of Butare when the genocide began on April 7, 1994. Rwanda indicted him in 2014 for alleged involvement in genocide and crimes against humanity in the former Butare Prefecture, now part of Huye District in Southern Province. The NPPA's November 9 statement did not detail his alleged involvement, Reuters reported.
Source: KT Press
The detailed allegations come from evidence US prosecutors presented at his 2019 trial, and they remain allegations about the genocide itself. ICE said in its 2019 statement that Teganya 'led teams of soldiers … to locate Tutsi patients and refugees hiding in the hospital. Once discovered, the Tutsis were taken and killed behind the maternity ward.' Evidence presented in the US case linked him to the killing of three Tutsi people at the hospital and four Tutsi students found in the dormitory where he lived, and to five rapes involving two Tutsi women hiding at the hospital, according to the trial record summarised by KT Press. US prosecutors also said he was a member of the MRND, the ruling party before and during the genocide, was involved in its Interahamwe youth wing, and took part in martial arts and weapons training through the group — all of which he was accused of concealing from immigration authorities.
Source: ICE statement via Reuters
A case that crossed three countries
As the genocide ended in July 1994, Teganya fled Rwanda for what was then Zaire, and later travelled through Kenya and India, according to the record of his US appeal. In 1999 he obtained a fake Zimbabwean passport and travelled to Canada, where he applied for asylum. Canadian authorities rejected his claim and determined twice that he was not entitled to asylum because of his alleged involvement in atrocities at the Butare hospital. His Canadian case ran for about 15 years; ordered to leave, he stayed anyway, and then crossed another border.
Source: KT Press
On August 3, 2014, Teganya was encountered walking after crossing the border from Canada into Houlton, Maine, and was taken into US custody. He applied for asylum in the United States — and that application became the criminal case that ended his time in America. US authorities said he failed to disclose his MRND membership and his activities during the genocide, and made false statements in immigration proceedings. Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts charged him in 2017 with immigration fraud and perjury.
Source: KT Press
The trial in Boston lasted 18 days. Teganya testified in his own defence and denied the extent of his involvement, but in April 2019 a federal jury convicted him on all five counts. On July 1, 2019, US District Judge F. Denis Saylor IV sentenced him to 97 months in prison, finding that he had also obstructed justice by committing perjury during the trial. The sentence was for the fraud and perjury — not a genocide conviction. The US First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentence in 2021. In a related case, Teganya's former classmate Eric Nshimiye, who testified for his defence in 2019, was himself convicted in Boston of perjury and obstruction over that testimony.
Source: KT Press
Why Washington pursued the case for a decade
The US government has described cases like Teganya's as part of a wider effort to stop the United States becoming a safe haven for people accused of genocide, war crimes and other grave human rights abuses. Its Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, created in 2003, works with immigration and law-enforcement agencies — in this case including Customs and Border Protection and the State Department — to identify, investigate, prosecute and remove suspected violators living in the country. For American readers, the case is a reminder of how the asylum system is policed from inside: the protection designed for victims can be withdrawn, and criminally punished, when an applicant is found to have hidden a persecutor's past.
Source: KT Press
Rwanda, for its part, thanked US judicial authorities for their cooperation. The NPPA expressed appreciation for continued US cooperation on mutual legal assistance and for the American contribution to international efforts to combat impunity and ensure accountability for genocide crimes — a pursuit Rwanda has maintained for more than three decades, as suspects who fled in 1994 built lives in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, some receiving refugee or immigration status before their alleged pasts became known.
Source: KT Press
What happens next
Teganya is now in Rwandan custody, but the November 9 NPPA announcement did not say when he will first appear in court, which charges will formally be presented, or what timetable the case will follow. What is settled is the shape of the fight ahead: Rwanda must prove in its own courts the genocide allegations that American prosecutors used as evidence but never had to prove as charges, and Teganya — who denied the extent of his involvement under oath in Boston — will face them as a defendant for the first time. For survivors and families of those killed at Butare, his return is one more step in an effort, now in its fourth decade, to bring suspected perpetrators before a court.
Source: Rwanda Dispatch / KT Press