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NKANGA, Rwanda, March 16 (AFP) - Concessa Kayisanabo was on her way home from church with her family when the Hutu peasant farmers attacked, beating her husband and finishing him off with a machete.
Like many Tutsi people in southern Rwanda's Bugesera region, Kayisanabo is now terrified of going home -- if the latest wave of tribal massacres, looting and burnings has left her house standing.
Still bandaged around her head, chest and arm, the 36-year-old mother had Monday been staying for more than a week at the institute of agronomic sciences, where soldiers brought her after the attack.
One nurse at the institute's health centre in Nkanga, Jean-Philippe Kimanzi, has to look after 418 Tutsi refugees, who have two bags of sorghum meal for all of them to eat, no blankets and few clothes.
Most need medical treatment, particularly for malaria.
Government officials in Kigali say 60 people died in the massacres, which began almost two weeks ago, but an AFP correspondent travelling in the Bugesera heard harrowing witness tales of well beyond 100 killings.
Diplomats in the capital of the small highland nation believe several hundred people have been slaughtered. At least 10,000 of the Tutsi minority, former traditional rulers, have fled their homes.
The killing appeared to have stopped Monday, but Tutsi houses were still burning and many local people said the army had come too late.
Opposition leaders Saturday called off a rally planned in protest at the violence after President Juvenal Habyarimana's ruling party signed an agreement opening the way for an interim coalition government.
General Major Habyarimana last week said exiled Tutsi rebels who invaded the country from Uganda in October 1990 were to blame for the bloodshed, though the interior ministry said only one Hutu died.
At Nyamata, where an Italian aid worker was shot dead by Rwandan gendarmes, Belgian priest Pierre de Canniere said all the Tutsi refugees in his parish had the same story to tell: "I've lost my father, my sister or my wife."
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