Citation
KIGALI, April 10 (AFP) - Ethnic killings, mainly of the Tutsi minority, and manhunts were still under way in the Rwandan capital Kigali on Sunday, leaving many bodies lying in the streets.
The massacres were taking place mostly in working-class districts, an AFP correspondent reported, four days after Rwanda's president and his counterpart from neighbouring Burundi were slain when their plane was reportedly shot down.
The correspondent saw at least 20 bodies piled up in front of her own home in a northeastern part of Kigali. Vans were picking up the dead to take them off for burial in mass graves.
Many people were murdered in their homes, and most Kigali residents dared not venture into the streets except to purchase essential food supplies.
Residents of the Hutu majority in the capital, sometimes backed by members of the Rwandan army, were murdering Tutsis in the latest flare-up of the central African nation's endemic ethnic strife, following the death of the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana.
Red Cross workers reported light arms fire in the morning Sunday, but said they could no longer hear any heavy weapons fire.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also stated that there were "too many bodies in the streets and the ICRC is giving priority to the living, the injured."
The ICRC earlier reported that "thousands" of people had been killed and wounded in ethnic bloodletting which brought the country to the brink of civil war since the death of Habyarimana in what the Rwandan government described as a rocket attack on his plane.
The president had been on his way home from a regional summit in Uganda to discuss UN-sponsored peace-making efforts in Rwanda and Burundi, also troubled by strife between Hutus and Tutsis.
His government last year signed a ceasefire and political deal with Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), but the front had yet to be brought into government.
mgu-ml/nb/jms
