Thread by @JewhadiTM

US secretly sent Rwandans accused of butchering Americans to Australia nypost.com/2019/05/16/us-… via @nypost

A bombshell report in Politico this week revealed that the people in question were a pair of Rwandans who confessed to their involvement in the grisly 1999 murder of eight tourists.

The two Americans, four Britons and two New Zealanders were on a gorilla-watching safari in the Ugandan rainforest in 1999 when they were slaughtered by Rwandan militants armed with guns and machetes.

After being identified by local authorities, Leonidas Bimenyimana and Gregoire Nyaminani were extradited to the US on terrorism charges in 2003, along with a third Rwandan man — and faced the death penalty.

But after a high-profile legal battle, a judge ruled in 2006 that their confessions had been obtained through torture by Rwandan authorities.

The case was dropped, and the men asked for asylum in the US — claiming that they’d be persecuted if they were sent home — kicking off another lengthy legal battle.

Now, friends and family of the victims are furious.

“That’s just insane,” Mark Ross, an American safari leader who survived the attack, told Politico.

“It’s almost like if you want to get out of a bad situation in a third-world country, murder someone from the country you want to go to and then you’ll get there—which is just so ironic.”