The Ugandan President, Mr Yoweri Museveni, said yesterday that his forces would capture or kill the Rwandan rebels who killed eight tourists in Uganda earlier this week, and admitted his government had not done enough to protect the victims.
Mr Museveni said a battalion of Ugandan troops was pursuing the ethnic Hutu rebels across the border into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Ugandan forces were receiving help from Rwandan government troops.
"If we don't catch them, we shall kill them," he told a news conference in Kampala.
He added that national park authorities should have requested army protection for tourists inside Bwindi national park. "There was also weakness on the side of the government of Uganda. . . There was laxity," he conceded.
He said the army would establish a presence in the densely forested area, famous as one of the last habitats of the world's remaining 600 mountain gorillas.
Both gorilla conservation and the growing Ugandan tourist industry are likely to be severely damaged by the atrocity.
Mr Museveni also appealed for international help in tackling the Hutu rebels, many of whom were members of the notorious Interahamwe militia which led the genocide of 800,000 people inside Rwanda in 1994. A team of US FBI agents landed in Uganda overnight to help investigate the murders.
More than 100 Rwandan rebels seized 31 foreign tourists at three camp sites in the park on Monday morning. They took 14 of their captives into the mountains and murdered eight of them with machetes and clubs, apparently also raping one of the women.
The six remaining hostages were released with a message warning the West to cut off its ties to Rwanda's Tutsi-led government, which is closely allied with Mr Museveni.
Uganda's High Commissioner to London said yesterday that Kampala was investigating "very seriously" British press reports that the rebels had left notes attached to the bodies saying: "Americans and British, we don't want you on our land. You support our enemy."
Britain denied that it could have provoked retaliation against its citizens through its support for the Tutsi-led government in Rwanda.
"Our support for the government of Rwanda is based on the government of Rwanda's policy of integration of Hutus and Tutsis and of reconciliation," said a spokesman for the Foreign Office.
The murdered Americans were Mr Rob Haubner and Ms Susan Miller, both senior executives at Intel Corp, the world's biggest maker of computer chips.
The two New Zealanders killed were identified as Ms Rhonda Avis and Ms Michelle Strathern. Ms Avis's husband, Mark, was one of six tourists released by the rebels.
The Britons killed were Mr Mark Lindgren, Mr Steven Roberts, Mr Martin Friend and Ms Joan Cotton.
The massacre produced one extraordinary coincidence. Ms Deanja Walther had already cheated death once in her life, by missing the Swissair flight which crashed into the Atlantic near Halifax in Canada last September, killing all 229 passengers including many of her close colleagues. She had been on stand-by.
On Monday, the 26-year-old Swissair stewardess was one of the six tourists to make it back alive after the kidnapping.
Six months after the air crash, she went on the gorilla tracking expedition to get over the trauma of the crash, but found her holiday turning into a nightmare when the rebels arrived at her camp.
"I was thinking that I was in a film. . . a bad movie," said Ms Walther as she recovered in Kampala yesterday. Throughout Monday, some of the group were picked out - apparently at random - and led away to be executed. At one point Ms Walther thought it was her turn.
"I felt someone grab me on my head. I started to cry," she said.
But she was released and left to make her way back to camp.