Opelika, Ala. ? Aside from his name and accent, Jean-Damascene Bizimana blends in almost perfectly in small-town Alabama. He has a house on a corner lot, SUV, Polo shirt, job and mortgage.

Bizimana has a past, though, that stretches to equatorial Africa and the worst mass killing in a generation.

Now a U.S. citizen, Bizimana was the U.N. ambassador from his native Rwanda and spoke for its regime in the Security Council during the ethnic violence that claimed 800,000 lives in 1994. With the recent disclosure that he now lives in this city of 25,500, he is being investigated by Rwanda’s government for possible prosecution.

Rwandan prosecutors claim Bizimana lied to the world on behalf of the killers while at the U.N., deflecting blame from his own government to prevent anyone from intervening to stop the bloodbath. “At no point did he denounce or distance himself from the murderous regime,” Augustin Nkusi, a spokesman for the National Prosecution Office of Rwanda, said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press.

If charged with genocide, Nkusi said, Bizimana would be the first person accused in the mass slayings who wasn’t in Rwanda at the time.

Bizimana, 51, denied any responsibility and said he repeatedly asked the U.N. to send more troops. He also called for a cease-fire.

“I am a man of peace,” Bizimana told the AP in an interview Thursday. “On what Rwanda is doing in an investigation, I don’t have any comment. All I know is I am innocent and had no role in what happened in 1994.”

Bizimana did not try to hide or change his identity after his tenure as U.N. ambassador ended in the summer of 1994. Records show he moved to Alabama with his wife that same year. By 2004, they had become U.S. citizens, obtained Social Security numbers and registered to vote.

Bizimana said he became a citizen “through the normal process,” but he declined to elaborate or say whether he sought political asylum in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security would not comment on how he became a citizen.

The U.S. government inquires into an applicant’s background and can deny citizenship on suspicion of criminal activity. But the evidence must show that the applicant personally committed the crimes or ordered others to do so, said Boyd F. Campbell, a Montgomery lawyer and former chairman of the American Bar Association’s immigration law committee.

Bizimana was in the diplomatic post in New York when the airplane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down in 1994 while trying to land in the capital of Kigali. The president, a member of the Hutu tribe, died in the crash, and hard-line Hutu forces began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours.

The Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front fought to stop the slayings, taking control of large sections of the country. The Tutsi rebels ultimately prevailed and remain in control today.

As the slaughter was occurring, Bizimana blamed the killings first on public anguish over the president’s death, then on the Tutsi-led RPF. He also called on the U.N. Security Council to persuade the Tutsis to agree to a comprehensive cease-fire.

Weeks later, Bizimana wrote to the U.N. secretary general blaming the Tutsi “war machine” for “large-scale massacres.” In the view of the current Tutsi government, he was pinning the slaughter on its victims.