March 28 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Paul Rusesabagina, the hero whose story is told in the film ‘Hotel Rwanda’, has arrived in Qatar after being released from prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for terrorism, as confirmed by the United States authorities.
“I can confirm that Paul Rusesabagina has left Rwanda and is currently in Doha,” said US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, as reported by the US newspaper ‘The New York Times’.
Kirby has stressed that the man, who also has Belgian nationality, “will soon begin his trip to the United States”, without giving further details. Rusesabagina was released on Saturday after winning a pardon from the president, Paul Kagame, of whom he is a well-known opponent.
Rusesabagina was arrested in August 2020 and sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Rwandan Supreme Court for his role in leading the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRDC), the political wing of the National Liberation Front (FLN) rebel group, which He claimed responsibility for several attacks between 2018 and 2019 that resulted in at least nine deaths.
The man acknowledged his ties to the FLN at the end of September 2020, although he argued that his role was solely of a “diplomatic” nature. Thus, he said that the MRDC created the FLN “as an armed wing, not as a terrorist group as the prosecutor claims.” “I don’t deny that the FLN committed crimes, but my role was diplomacy,” he stressed.
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 .
