SUSPECTED Hutu militiamen have massacred 22 people, including 17 girl students and a Belgian nun, in a new ethnic attack in Rwanda national radio reported yesterday.
"Armed bandits" burst into a business and accountancy training school for young women at Muramba in Gisenyi province in north west Rwanda, at 1 a.m. on Monday and tried to separate the students into Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.
The radio report said that when the young women refused, the attackers machine gunned them, killing 17 students, a Belgian nun who ran the training college for student teachers in Muramba, and four civilians who lived nearby.
The nun was named as Sr Margarita Bosmans (62). She had run the teacher training college for 20 years. Fourteen people were wounded, nine of them seriously.
Security forces captured one of the attackers, the report said.
The attack on Monday night followed the murder in Kigali on Sunday of the chief editor of a privately owned magazine, Mr Appolos Hakizimana, by two unidentified gunmen who shot him in the head, but did not harm a relative who was with him.
The association Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF Journalists without Borders) wrote a letter to the President, Mr Pasteur Bizimungu, asking for arrests, a trial and convictions.
RSF said Mr Hakizimana, who edited the Umuravamba magazine, had been arrested on July 30th last year and accused of being a member of the Interahamwe Hutu extremist, held responsible with former government troops for the genocide of more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.
Mr Hakizimana was released three weeks later.
Since last year, two attacks by armed gangs who asked their victims to separate into ethnic groups took place in northern and eastern Rwanda.