The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said yesterday that at least 231 people were killed and an estimated 227 others wounded in an attack on a camp in north-west Rwanda housing ethnic Tutsi Congolese refugees.
A UNHCR spokeswoman, Ms Judith Kumin said that 90 per cent of the camp's refugees, who fled ethnic violence in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been killed with machetes in the Wednesday night attack on Mudende camp. Earlier, aid officials in Kigali had put the death toll at 200 and said the attackers were rebels of Rwanda's Hutu majority.
Ms Kumin said the death toll was based on a first count of the victims and there were no immediate details. All 17,000 refugees at the Mudende camp, less than 25 km from the north-western border town of Gisenyi, fled the camp after the raid which took place at around 2 a.m. (local time), she said. UNHCR staff were not present in the camp at the time.
"The camp is now empty. Nobody seems to be left on the site," she said. The attackers burnt down some 150 tents before leaving but there were no immediate details on the circumstances surrounding the raid or their identities, Ms Kumin said.
It was the second attack on Mudende since the killing of 148 people, mostly ethnic Zairean Tutsi refugees, by suspected Hutu rebel gangs in August. The rebels are fighting against Rwanda's government which took power after the 1994 Hutu-led genocide of more than half a million minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
Meanwhile yesterday, the US secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, yesterday pledged to Rwanda the full moral and financial support of the United States, saying the country's future was critical to the region.
At a joint press conference in Kigali with President Pasteur Bizimungu, she congratulated Rwanda on the "remarkable accomplishment" of repatriating hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees from Tanzania and the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ms Albright, who had met Mr Bizimungu as well as the VicePresident and Defence Minister, Mr Paul Kagame, condemned the Hutu extremist Interahamwe rebels and soldiers of the former Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) for failing to choose the path of peace.