Two men once accused of butchering tourists sat in American legal limbo for decades—until another country agreed to welcome them.
Zoya Sheftalovich contributed to this report.
But in the case of two of the Rwandans, POLITICO has learned that the U.S. government has solved the problem by relocating the men—thanks to an undisclosed deal with one of its closest allies. Last November, without any public announcement, the pair packed up their things at an immigration detention center in rural Virginia and prepared for a trip that must have been almost impossible for them to fathom. After over 15 years in U.S.
Under a murky pact struck between President Barack Obama’s administration and then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, the U.S. agreed to take in as many as 1,250 migrants that Australia was holding in controversial offshore refugee centers, while Australia agreed to accept a smaller number of refugees in Central America as part of a U.S.-organized effort to relocate people fleeing drug-related violence.
“I was listening to the birds and watching the light slowly come up when I heard trees splitting and crashing down. It was not windy. There was no storm. So, it surprised me. Then, I heard shots,” recalled Ross, who has spent decades on African safaris as guide and pilot, and was in the park overnight accompanying a small tour. “They had just shot the senior warden and killed him. Eventually, they poured fuel on him and burned him…in front of some of us.
The FBI and Scotland Yard swung into action, traveling to the scene in Uganda to investigate the killings and hostage-taking of U.S. and British citizens, but the investigation proved challenging, as no eyewitnesses among the tourists had lived to attest to the murders. The FBI evena $5 million reward for information leading to suspects in the killings.
After protracted negotiations with the government of Rwanda, the three defendants were flown out of the country. They made their first U.S. court appearance in Puerto Rico, and then in federal court in Washington, D.C. At a March 2003 press conference at Justice Department headquarters, the Bush administration portrayed the case as striking a blow for the U.S. in the Global War on Terror. "This indictment should serve as a warning," said Michael Chertoff, who was then.
U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle held an extraordinary pretrial hearing that lasted 22 days over five weeks in May and June of 2006, featuring testimony from the defendants and Kbingo. The three defendants offered details: Nyaminani said he faced a form of torture known as “kwasa kwasa” in which a rope was used to tie one of his wrists over his shoulder to another behind his back. Bimenyimana claimed he was shackled and beaten with a sock containing a brick.
“Completely nonsensical … totally implausible,” the judge wrote about the testimony of the government’s key witness, Kibingo.While a lengthy, globe-spanning investigation was just getting started in the aftermath of the attack, friends and family back home in New Zealand, Scotland and the United States mourned the murdered tourists. | AP; Getty Images
By February 2007, the criminal case was over. But the defendants were not free men. Had they been American citizens, they would have walked out of Huvelle’s courtroom and onto the streets. But two of the men would remain behind bars for another 11 years—and the third even longer., defense attorneys served notice that their clients wanted asylum in the U.S.—a kind of nightmare scenario that critics of U.S. terrorism prosecutions have long warned about.
But where were they going? On that, the court papers were silent. Officials at the Farmville, Virginia immigration detention center where the men had spent more than a decade said two of the men, Bimenyimana and Nyaminani, were “released,” but offered no other details. Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement referred questions to a Justice Department spokesperson, who declined to comment.
saying the process involves assessing the “character” of potential admittees and includes “checks related to national security, criminality, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” It also says that Australian officials work “closely with…international partners in conducting checks.”the deal solved two-thirds of the problem. The remaining Rwandan man, Francois Karake, is now being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center about 20 miles west of downtown Miami.
It’s unclear why Australia balked at taking Karake, but one reason may be an altercation he got into with a guard at the Farmville, Va. immigration detention center in September 2015, as talks about resolving the appeals were underway. “Mr. Karake became irate and attacked the guard striking him multiple times on the head with his fists. He also used a pencil to inflict wounds, as well as biting the guard,” a police report says.
The decision to accept the two men poses obvious risks for the Australian leaders involved at various stages of the process, heightened by the extreme political pressure that has surrounded the immigration issue in that country for nearly two decades. At the time the U.S. began actively seeking a destination for the Rwandans, in 2015 and 2016, Australia was courting U.S.
President Barack Obama was open to helping Australia by taking many of the offshore migrants and resettling them in the U.S., but it was less clear what the Aussies could do in return. In September 2016, Turnbull made an unexpected, public pledge to take part in a U.S.-led effort to resettle migrants fleeing drug-cartel-related violence in Central America who might otherwise have ended up as asylum-seekers at the US border. A former U.S.
Turnbull’s announcement of the deal five days after Trump’s surprise victory was long on celebration of the U.S.’s commitment to take in the refugees from Australia’s offshore camps and short on detail about what Australia had agreed to do in return. But the deal was soon on the rocks, thanks to Trump, who’d campaigned on reducing illegal immigration and the U.S.’s own intake of refugees.
It seems unlikely that Australia ever signed an ironclad commitment to the Obama administration to take the three Rwandans--in part because only two ended up going, and in part because Turnbull also stressed during the call that both the U.S. and Australia retained the right to reject any individual migrant on security grounds.
Told that two of the Rwandan suspects were relocated to Australia, Roocke immediately suspected a connection to Australia’s long struggle with its policy of holding refugees offshore. “It sounds like a political thing. … It sounds like a swap,” Roocke said.
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