Hutus run amok, kill 231 in Kigali

Col. Kayumba Nyamwasa, a regional Rwandan Army commander, said he had counted 230 bodies. Kayumba said the attackers had used hand-grenades, machetes and guns during a 15-minute raid.

He said soldiers were unable to repel the attackers, who fled to Congo.The UN high commissioner for refugees urgently requested medical supplies for about 227 wounded who were being treated at the hospital in Gisenyi, 100 km northwest of the capital, Kigali, Ghedini said.

This was the second attack on Mudende camp since August, when more than 100 refugees were hacked or shot dead during a raid blamed on Hutu rebels.

The refugees had fled the Masisi region in mid-1996 to escape attacks by Hutu rebels, who were then based at the refugee camps in eastern Zaire, since renamed Congo.

Authorities say the rebels, responsible for the deaths of 500,000 minority Tutsis in a 1994 Hutu genocide in Rwanda, have mixed with more than 1 million civilians who returned to Rwanda late last year.

The Tutsi-led government blames the rebels for an upsurge in violence in the north-western corner of Rwanda. Barely a week passes without a rebel ambush or an attack on a jail.

The attack today coincided with a one-day visit by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Kigali, where she held talks with the government leaders and praised their efforts at reconciliation.

Albright had left Rwanda before news of the attack became known.

Earlier in the day, the privately owned Rwanda News Agency said the Hutu rebels had killed a mayor and 11 other people at Ramba Commune, south of Gisenyi.

It said the rebels appear to be targeting local authorities and Tutsi survivors of the 1994 genocide.