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BUTARE, Rwanda, April 10 (AFP) - UN agencies were planning to evacuate more civilian personnel from Kigali Sunday after about 100 staff left the strife-torn Rwandan capital for Burundi by road with only key staff staying behind.
Evacuees of the High Commissioner for Refugees, World Food Program, the UN Program for Development and other United Nations bodies arrived at Butare in south Rwanda late Saturday in a 20-vehicle convoy.
They were due to reach the Burundi border early Sunday and drive on to Bujumbura after most of them spent the night in their cars.
Evacuation coordinator Francois Tissot said a second convoy would leave Kigali Sunday.
In Kigali Saturday afternoon evacuees' cars were shot at and four people were slightly wounded by shrapnel, he said.
Also Saturday about 200 US nationals left Kigali by road for Bujumbura where 300 US Marines landed earlier in the day to evacuate expatriates.
Another convoy with 200 foreigners, mostly Belgian, Dutch, German and Swiss nationals, left Butare for Bujumbura early Saturday.
Only French nationals have been able so far to leave Kigali by air after French paratroopers secured the capital's airport overnight Friday.
Kigali was calm early Sunday, according to a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
But Kigali residents feared a fresh outbreak of violence later in the day after the arrival of 4,000 rebels of the minority Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front.
The troops are to back up a 600-men rebel force sent to Kigali after a peace agreement was signed in Arusha last August that was to end a three-year civil war.
The ICRC looked after 100 wounded in the Rwandan capital Saturday but thousands have died since Rwandan president Juvenal Habyaramina was killed in an air crash late Wednesday after his plane was shot down, said the ICRC head delegate in Kigali, Philippe Gaillard.
Gaillard and other UN employees who arrived here late Saturday said "totally drunk" Rwandan soldiers set up road blocks in Kigali Saturday afternoon and hardly any free passages could be negotiated with them.
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