Fifteen of the Hutu rebels who murdered eight foreign tourists in Uganda have been killed in a Rwandan army ambush, a senior Ugandan military officer said yesterday.
Lieut-Col Benon Birano said Rwanda's army killed 15 of the rebels in an ambush on Wednesday after Ugandan troops pursued them across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He told reporters the Rwandan army laid the ambush on the road between Goma and Kisoro in eastern Congo after being alerted by their Ugandan allies. Ethnic Hutu rebels, or Interahamwe, who carried out a campaign of genocide against minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, are fighting the Tutsi-led government which subsequently ousted them from most of the country. They abducted 31 foreign tourists from Uganda's Bwindi National Park at dawn on Monday and later butchered eight of them with clubs and machetes. Others escaped or were released.
Anti-western messages written on photos of a gorilla and a kingfisher were found on the bodies of some of the murdered tourists, Lieut-Col Benon Birano said.
A text on the kingfisher photo said: "This is the fate of the Anglo-Saxons who betrayed us, favouring the Nilotics [peoples originating from the Nile river basin] to the detriment of Bantu cultivators. If you do not understand through these lessons, it is because you do not want to understand. You will understand by the force of nature."
Rwanda has complex social structures in which the minority Tutsis have been considered traditional overlords over the majority Hutus. While the Tutsis have traditionally been equated with Nilotic peoples - and the Hutus with the Bantu - this is now generally regarded as an oversimplification. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office yesterday denied accusations of a cover-up, alleged by the brother of a British man taken hostage by Rwandan rebels six months ago.
Mr Douglas Kear (66) was seized on August 11th and his brother Alec has accused the Foreign Office of playing down the risks of travelling in central Africa. He also alleged that government officials told him not to speak to the media about the abduction.