Jean Léonard Teganya has been deported from the United States to Rwanda, where prosecutors say he faces allegations relating to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
Rwanda’s National Public Prosecution Authority said the former medical student arrived at Kigali International Airport on the evening of 9 November, accompanied by US security officers, and was handed over to Rwandan authorities.
The authority said it had indicted Teganya in 2014 over alleged genocide and crimes against humanity in the former Butare prefecture in southern Rwanda. It did not set out the individual accusations in detail or give a date for a court appearance. Teganya has previously denied taking part in the genocide.
His return is a new step in a long-running case that has involved immigration proceedings in Canada and a criminal trial in the United States. It is not a conviction on the Rwandan allegations.
A separate US conviction
In 2019, a federal jury in Boston convicted Teganya on two counts of immigration fraud and three counts of perjury. Those offences concerned statements connected with his application for asylum in the United States, rather than a charge of genocide. He received a prison sentence of 97 months.
US prosecutors said he had failed to disclose his own membership of the Rwandan political party known as the MRND and its associated Interahamwe militia. The case also concerned his denial, in the asylum process, of participating in harm against people because of their membership of a particular social group.
Teganya pleaded not guilty and testified in his own defence at the US trial. The jury convicted him on all five counts after a trial lasting 18 days, according to the appeal court record.
He challenged his convictions and sentence. His appeal included objections to parts of an expert witness’s testimony and to an increase in the sentencing calculation for obstruction of justice. In May 2021, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld both the convictions and the sentence.
The US Justice Department said evidence at the trial included allegations that Teganya led soldiers and militia members through a hospital in Butare to find Tutsi patients and people seeking refuge. The department said people found there were taken away and killed. Teganya has previously denied taking part in the genocide. The allegations were presented as evidence in the immigration case; they should not be treated as a verdict on the separate Rwandan charges.
Years of proceedings
Teganya was studying medicine at the National University of Rwanda in Butare and training at the university hospital during the genocide. He left Rwanda in July 1994 and travelled through what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya and India before reaching Canada in 1999, according to the US appeal judgment.
He sought asylum in Canada, where authorities rejected his application in 2002 and again after appeals in 2012. The US court record says he crossed the Canadian border into Maine in August 2014 and then applied for asylum in the United States. US authorities said he had evaded a Canadian deportation order.
In September 2017, he was indicted in Massachusetts on the five US counts that later went to trial. The Rwandan indictment is a different proceeding, brought under a different jurisdiction, and its outcome remains to be determined.
The wider history
The genocide unfolded over roughly 100 days from April 1994. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Tutsi, were killed as extremist leaders of Rwanda’s Hutu majority directed a campaign against the Tutsi minority. Hutu opponents of the violence were also targeted.
In the aftermath, Rwanda’s national courts dealt with genocide cases alongside community-based gacaca courts. The United Nations also established an international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, to try people accused of serious crimes connected with the genocide. That tribunal completed its work in 2015.
Teganya’s return to Rwanda does not establish whether the allegations against him are true. The precise accusations to be pursued and any hearing date have not been publicly detailed in the prosecution authority’s announcement.
