Paul Rusesabagina, who was portrayed as a hero in the film Hotel Rwanda, has been released from a Rwandan prison, US officials say, after his sentence was commuted following intense diplomacy by the United States.
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Rusesabagina, a US permanent resident, was accompanied by a US embassy official as he was moved from prison to the residence of Qatar's ambassador in Kigali late on Friday, according to two senior Biden administration officials who briefed reporters in Washington.
Rusesabagina was sentenced in September 2021 to 25 years over his ties to a group opposed to Rwandan President Paul Kagame that has an armed wing.
The Rwandan government announced earlier on Friday it was commuting Rusesabagina's sentence.
Rusesabagina would remain in Rwanda for a couple of days before travelling to Doha and then to the United States, the officials said.
"There was no particular concession made by us as the government here," said one of the US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"I think of this one much more as a sequence of steps that were worked out involving the Rwandan government, US government and of course Paul himself."
Washington's historically close ties with Rwanda have been strained by the case and by US allegations, denied by Kigali, that Rwanda has sent troops into neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and supports rebels there.
Stephanie Nyombayire, spokesperson for Rwandan President Paul Kagame, tweeted that the release was "the result of a shared desire to reset US-Rwanda relationship".
Rusesabagina, 68, denied the charges and boycotted the trial, which he and his supporters called a political sham.
He also said he had been kidnapped from Dubai in 2019 and returned to Rwanda by force. Kagame denied any abduction, but suggested Rusesabagina had been tricked in Dubai into boarding a plane to Rwanda.
Washington designated him as "wrongly detained", partly because of what it called a lack of guarantees of a fair trial.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Kagame during a visit to Kigali in August and "spoke a great deal about the road map to Paul's eventual release", said a US official familiar with the matter, adding the intervention helped secure the early release.
Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle, portrays Rusesabagina's success in saving more than 1000 refugees, including his family, during the genocide in 1994 by sheltering them in the besieged hotel that he managed in Kigali.
Australian Associated Press
