The hero of the movie "Hotel Rwanda" has been released and is traveling to the United States to see his family.
Rusesabagina was delivered last Friday after President Kagame drove his sentence, following a long time of dealings among Washington and Kigali.
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| [Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters] Paul Rusesabagina, the man who was heroized in a Hollywood film about the country's 1994 genocide, is detained and paraded in handcuffs in front of the media at the Rwanda Investigation Bureau in Kigali on August 31, 2020. |
A person who is familiar with the situation said on Wednesday that Paul Rusesabagina, the man who was the inspiration for the movie Hotel Rwanda, has boarded a plane in Qatar bound for Houston after being released from prison in Rwanda last week.
Rusesabagina, a permanent resident of the United States who has lived in exile for more than a decade in San Antonio, Texas, was given a 25-year sentence in September 2021 for his ties to an armed opposition group to Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
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The 68-year-old, a vocal opponent of Kagame, claims that in 2019, he was enticed to Rwanda when he boarded a private plane in Dubai thinking it was headed for Bujumbura, Burundi. Instead, the plane landed in Kigali, where he was detained.
After months of negotiations between Washington and Kigali, Kagame commuted his sentence and released him on Friday. On Monday, he arrived in Doha.
After being portrayed by actor Don Cheadle in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, which depicted him as a hero who risked his life to shelter hundreds of people as manager of a luxury hotel during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Rusesabagina received widespread acclaim.
Rusesabagina's detention and US allegations, which Kigali denied, that Rwanda has sent troops into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo and supported rebels strained Washington's historically close ties with Rwanda.
Similar allegations have been made by experts from the United Nations and the European Union.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two rights organizations, have also accused the Kagame administration of stifling dissent.
Rwanda claims that Rusesabagina's release is the result of a shared desire to reshape relations between the US and Rwanda.
Rusesabagina loaded onto a plane on Wednesday morning and is planned to land in Houston in the early evening, where he is supposed to see his family, a source acquainted with the matter told Reuters.
He admitted during his trial that he was a leader of an opposition group, but he denied being responsible for attacks that its armed wing carried out in Rwanda.
The two wings of the group, according to the trial judges, were indistinguishable.