A Hutu man alleged to be complicit in the murder of hundreds of Tutsis at Butare University Hospital was arrested by the US Border Patrol near Houlton, Maine on Thursday.
Jean Leonard Teganya had been denied refugee status in Canada and apparently decided to take his chances in America, but was arrested after a local citizen reported a “suspicious person.”
Teganya will not be staying in America for very long. If he is not deported directly to Rwanda, he will go to Canada, where the Immigration Review Board determined in 2012 that he did not qualify for refugee status.
The IRB questioned why he survived and stayed at the hospital. He said he was determined to complete his internship.
“This justification is not reasonable in the context of the Rwandan horror,” the IRB found. “Although he claims that he did not participate actively in the massacres, the panel … is entitled to ask itself whether the claimant’s passivity in the face of the massacres is not equivalent to endorsing the policies and methods of the party in power.
“The panel is entitled to ask itself why the presence of the claimant on the campus did not seem to concern the extremists, who pursued their dirty work for several weeks.”
Mr. Teganya’s father was a regional leader in the Hutu-led governing Mouvement Révolutionaire National pour le Développement, the party in power at the time of the genocide, court heard.
After a sixteen-year fight to stay, claiming that he could not receive a fair trial and faced torture if he returned to Rwanda, Teganya was reportedly deported in 2012. But that is apparently not the case, which leaves Canadian authorities with the embarrassing task of explaining how that happened.
Amazingly, Teganya was apprehended without a giant militarized border wall.