Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’, will be released this Saturday

March 24 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Paul Rusesabagina, known as the hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’, and who was sentenced in 2021 to 25 years for terrorism crimes, will be released this Saturday after obtaining a pardon from the president, Paul Kagame, of whom he is a recognized opponent.

He is scheduled to be released from the Nyarugenge prison where he is being held this Saturday, March 25, along with other members of the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRDC) –considered a terrorist by the authorities–, of which he is the leader, like Callixte Nsabimana, alias ‘Sankara’, sources report to the ‘New Times’ newspaper.

The government spokesperson, Yolande Makolo, has qualified on CNN that the pardon “does not extinguish the sentence” and has thanked the United States and Qatar for having helped to achieve these conditions for his release, which, he has also specified, was comes after a letter of pardon from Rusesabagina to President Kagame.

Qatar is expected to organize the departure of Rusesabagina from Rwanda – who also has Belgian nationality – prior to his reunion with his relatives in the United States.

Rusesabagina was arrested in August 2020 and sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Rwandan Supreme Court for his role at the head of the MRDC, the political wing of the National Liberation Front (FLN) rebel group, which claimed responsibility for several attacks between 2018 and 2019 that resulted in at least nine deaths.

The United Nations denounced that the detention was carried out arbitrarily and under strange circumstances, in addition to questioning the impartiality of a trial. In turn, he recalled Rusesabagina’s record as a critic of the Kagame government and in defense of Human Rights.

Rusesabagina is world famous for the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’. As acting manager of the Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali, he was able to protect more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus within the establishment during the 1994 genocide — in which nearly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred — by leveraging his connections .