Kigali: The man in U.S. custody since Thursday over questions on his residence visa and connection to 1994 Genocide says he is simply being hunted by the Rwandan government for testifying in defense of another suspect, RNA reports.

Lazare Kobagaya, 82, gave a sworn statement in Francois Bazaramba’s defence - another suspect in Finland, reason for which the Rwandan government was retaliating by falsely accusing him of complicity in the genocide, according to Kobagaya's son Andre Kandy, the Associated Press reported.  

It is not the first time that a Genocide suspect has claimed witch-hunt from Kigali. Similar situation often happen where Rwandan exiles have been investigated for their past here. Some have turned out to be bitter critics of government.  

In the Kobagaya case, American prosecutors in the State of Kansas plan to use witness statements and evidence collected by the Finnish government against Francois Bazaramba, a Baptist minister accused of leading a massacre of 5,000 Tutsis near the Burundi border.

Bazaramba settled in Finland in 2003, and Finnish investigators have been to Rwanda to interview genocide survivors and inspect the scenes of the massacres. The US court requested that Finnish authorities provide documents, photographs, witness statements and other evidence gathered in the Bazaramba case to try Kobagaya. Finland decided in February against extraditing Bazaramba.

In 1997 elderly Kobagaya applied for a visa in Kansas, telling immigration officials he had not committed any crimes for which he had not been arrested, and that he was in Burundi from 1993 to 1995, placing himself outside Rwanda during the genocide. Immigration officials granted him the visa and, in 2006, US citizenship.

According to the US indictment, during the mass killings, Kobagaya had in fact been in a Nyakizu (Southern Rwanda), exhorting fellow Hutus to murder and participating in killings himself.

In April 1994, a group of Hutus gathered in a marketplace in the village of Birambo. According to the indictment, Kobagaya urged them to set fire to Tutsi homes and mobilised teams to pursue fleeing Tutsis. Later, Kobagaya urged Hutus to kill Tutsi women who had been spared because they were married to Hutu men, prosecutors wrote.

Kobagaya's family told AP on Friday during the short court recess that he is innocent, contending he was too old and sick to participate in the atrocities. He did not enter a plea at a hearing in Kansas town of Wichita – where he has been living.

His son Andre Kandy acknowledged his father was in Rwanda during the killings, but as a refugee from neighbouring Burundi. He said his father, whom he said considers himself from Burundi, speaks little English and probably misunderstood immigration officials' questions.

"What they want to do is revoke his citizenship so he can be deported and killed," Kandy is reported to have said.

The US government's strategy in the case mirrors its prosecution of suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, who settled in Ohio after the Second World War, AP said.  

Demjanjuk was not charged with committing a violent crime, but rather with concealing his activities from US immigration officials. Demjanjuk, 89, is currently fighting deportation to Germany.

"This is the first case in history in which the US government will seek to prove genocide in a federal district court," Eli Rosenbaum, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which is prosecuting the case along with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, told the JTA – a Jewish news organization.

Meanwhile, in Kigali, when RNA broke the story locally, Prosecutor General Martin Ngoga said the development was “welcome” but added that “there are other fugitives in US and that way forward will be discussed in due course”.

European countries have declined Rwandan requests to extradite genocide suspects, for fear they would not receive a fair trial, causing Rwandan officials to complain that genocide suspects live free in Europe and North America while the country struggles to come to grips with its recent history.

Earlier this month, four Rwandan men suspected of participating in the genocide were freed earlier after a British court blocked an extradition request from the Rwandan government. Judges at the UN court based in Tanzania established to try suspects has also blocked the transfer of suspects – as it prepares to end its activities.

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