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KIGALI, Jan 27 (AFP) - Youths claiming to support Rwanda's military leader have massacred at least 80 people and injured several hundred in attacks on their opponents, according to an official provisional toll Wednesday.
Young Hutus in the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRNDD) have since January 21 attacked members of the ethnic Tutsi minority, particularly in the northwestern Gisenyi and western Kibuye regions.
The administrator's office in Ginsenyi district, President Juvenal Habyarimana's birthplace, said 66 people have been killed in eight places, including 23 at Satinskyi, 15 at Gaseke and 10 at Giciye.
In Kibuye, the latest flare-up of ethnic strife has claimed the lives of 10 of the Bagogwe pastoral tribe related to the Tutsis, while about 10 others have been injured, two seriously.
Some 150 Bagogwe have fled from the Gishwati forest region where they had their homes, reporting that their houses were being systematically burned down and their cattle stolen or slaughtered.
Officials said the violence in Gishwati began at the beginning of the month, when about a dozen people were hurt, a score of houses set ablaze or wrecked and 200 people displaced.
Later trouble has arisen from Hutu displeasure at a peace accord with the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which offers places in the government to the central east African country's one-time overlords.
Exiled for decades, the RPF invaded Rwanda in October 1990.
mgu-jpc/nb AFP AFP SEQN-0298
