Two men once accused of butchering tourists sat in American legal limbo for years—until another country agreed to welcome them.
For more than a decade, the United States had a problem: three Rwandan men, sitting in jail in Virginia, who had stood accused of brutally murdering tourists in Africa—but now had a chance of winning release onto American streets.
The three had been rounded up after a bloody 1999 attack that made headlines across three continents, in which two Americans and six other Western tourists on a gorilla-watching visit to the Ugandan rainforest were killed with machetes and axes. The crime was so horrific that U.S. prosecutors charged the men under terrorism statutes, extracted them from Rwanda and then took the rare step of demanding the federal death penalty.
But in 2006, the prosecution went off the rails: A judge in Washington ruled the men’s confessions were obtained through torture in Rwandan detention centers, and the case was dropped. The men fell into immigration purgatory, fighting their return to Rwanda out of fear they’d be mistreated by the government there but lacking the right to stay in the U.S.
The three became examples of a thorny issue that arises when the U.S. takes custody of terrorism suspects abroad. Harsh treatment they received overseas, or claimed to have received, can derail the cases against them—but once they’re on American soil, U.S. law gives the government no clear Plan B. Much like the terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, they can languish in limbo for years without being convicted of any crime, becoming a frustration for authorities and a human rights black eye for the U.S.
For more than a decade, the United States had a problem: three Rwandan men, sitting in jail in Virginia, who had stood accused of brutally murdering tourists in Africa—but now had a chance of winning release onto American streets.
The three had been rounded up after a bloody 1999 attack that made headlines across three continents, in which two Americans and six other Western tourists on a gorilla-watching visit to the Ugandan rainforest were killed with machetes and axes. The crime was so horrific that U.S. prosecutors charged the men under terrorism statutes, extracted them from Rwanda and then took the rare step of demanding the federal death penalty.
But in 2006, the prosecution went off the rails: A judge in Washington ruled the men’s confessions were obtained through torture in Rwandan detention centers, and the case was dropped. The men fell into immigration purgatory, fighting their return to Rwanda out of fear they’d be mistreated by the government there but lacking the right to stay in the U.S.
The three became examples of a thorny issue that arises when the U.S. takes custody of terrorism suspects abroad. Harsh treatment they received overseas, or claimed to have received, can derail the cases against them—but once they’re on American soil, U.S. law gives the government no clear Plan B. Much like the terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, they can languish in limbo for years without being convicted of any crime, becoming a frustration for authorities and a human rights black eye for the U.S.
Interahamwe by Scott Chacon is licensed under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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