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KIGALI, Sept 25 (AFP) - A mayor and his family have been massacred at Buyoya in northeastern Rwanda by unidentified attackers who used grenades and knives, a defence ministry source said Thursday.
The source, who asked not to be named, said that the killers slew the official, his wife, six children and two bodyguards in an overnight attack on September 8, and recognised that "this kind of incident happens from time to time across the country".
However, the source said that the incident was not a general indication of the "security situation" in that part of Rwanda, which is still emerging from a civil war between victorious Tutsi forces and extremists of the Hutu majority in 1994.
The source was speaking the day Amnesty International released a report condemning the international community for standing by as thousands died in continued ethnic killing in the central African country as refugees and fighters have returned from neighbouring countries.
The mayor's home was targetted in the Byumba administrative district, which had hitherto been largely spared such attacks, unlike the northwestern Gisenyi region on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The east of the former Zaire remains a complex ethnic powderkeg of clashes between Hutus, Tutsis and other ethnic groups following an uprising by the current RDC President Laurent Kabila, whose rebel alliance ousted dictator Mobutu Sesek Seko in May.
Local officials in Rwanda are frequently caught up in conflict between the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which seized the capital Kigali in July 1994, and extremist Hutu militiamen or former government troops.
Many victims of current bloodshed are said by various sources to be people who escaped the genocide of up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, either killed in RPA reprisals or by returnees responsible for the massacre determined to silence witnesses.
A report by the UN Human Rights Mission in Rwanda issued at the end of August stated that 108 government workers and 10 judicial officials were known to have been murdered between January 1996 and June 1997.
The UN team blamed most of the slaughter on Hutu extremists, but also accused agents of the state.
"A large number of the attacks were carried out against administrative officials considered to have collaborated with armed groups or who did not sufficiently cooperate with the government authorities in their fight against them," the report said.
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