The trial of a Rwandan-American accused of involvement in the genocide has begun in the United States

Eric Nashimieh, an American citizen, says the evidence against him consists of unreliable eyewitness accounts.

Boston, Massachusetts, USA - A US federal court in Boston has opened the trial of a Rwandan-American accused of covering up his role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Prosecutors say Eric Nashimieh, 55, a father of four and a US citizen, took part in a nationwide outbreak of genocidal violence against the Tutsi ethnic minority by the majority Hutu extremists in April 1994. More than 800,000 people were killed in about 100 days in what the United Nations called

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End of list US Department of Homeland Security investigators arrested Nashimieh at his home in Ohio in 2024, claiming he lied to them in an interview about his time in Rwanda during the genocide. They also allege that he perjured himself at a previous trial in 2019 in Boston, when he was accused of committing genocide by a friend. Prosecutors say Nashimia, a medical student during the genocide in the city of Butare, himself participated in the killing and rape of Tutsis.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Looney told the court on Tuesday, including Nashimia, that the Hutus who participated in the violence "heeded the government's requests to end their neighbors."

"He himself attacked the Tutsis and handed them over to be killed and raped," Looney said.

During his testimony in 2019, Nshimeh denied being part of the genocide, saying he was not part of the pro-Hutu National Revolutionary Movement for Development and the Interahamwe militia group, which was responsible for most of the killings during the genocide.

Because of these denials, Nashimia is facing charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. If convicted, the Trump administration could try to revoke the resident's citizenship.

Nshimieh, who is an ethnic Hutu, said he had gone on holiday to the country's capital, Kigali, before the violence broke out. He says he never returned to Butare because of the chaos that gripped the country in April 1994 and instead left the country as a refugee, eventually coming to the United States and becoming a citizen in 2009.

At the opening of his case on Tuesday, Nashimia, dressed in a dark blue suit, was calm, occasionally smiling at family and friends who came to support him. Since his arrest, authorities have held Nashimia without bail at a federal prison in the Boston area.

Prosecutors plan to put more than a dozen witnesses on the stand, most of them from Rwanda, who say they remember Nshimiye participating in pro-Hutu political events before the genocide, and some say they later witnessed his involvement in genocidal violence in Butare.

His family says the events of 1994 are more complicated than the simple narrative of Hutus killing Tutsis. "Simply should not be enough to convince a jury of someone who participated in the genocide," ethnic Hutu Budnik, Epa Bizimana, Nashimie's nephew, told Al Jazeera.

"Juries will learn some things for the first time; Americans will learn something for the first time," said Bizimana, who was 10 years old with his family in 1994.

Defense lawyers told the court on Tuesday that Nashimia was not part of the Hutus who participated in the genocide. They say the entire case against him is based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, some of whom were able to identify him only after repeatedly being shown his photo, and some of whom have a history of testifying differently in alleged genocide trials over the years.

One of the defense attorneys, Kurt Kearns, told the court that the prosecution's case was based on evidence that “reared its ugly head only after Eric came forward to testify as a character witness and 25 years after the genocide.

Cairns said Nashimia was never involved in domestic and international courts after the genocide, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, as well as an informal transitional justice system within Rwanda, known as Gacaca, which prosecuted more than a million people for their role in the crime.