Hunt On for Zimbabweans Who Killed 16

Helicopter gunships and soldiers on foot moved across Zimbabwe’s southern bush country Friday in search of machete-wielding rebels who raided a Christian missionary farm commune and hacked to death 16 white people, seven of them children and infants.

Prime Minister Robert Mugabe condemned the massacre as “an act of unbridled savagery” and pledged that military and security forces would track down the killers.

Two of the victims were American, one was British and 13 were white Zimbabweans, and they lived on a communal mission farm about 60 miles south of Bulawayo, capital of the province of Matabeleland. The youngest victim was a 6-week-old boy.

Home Affairs Minister Enos Nkala, confirming details of the massacre at a news conference in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, said the killings were the work of about 20 peasants led by a man known as Gayigusu, who Nkala described as a “dissident” bandit long wanted by the army. Nkala said the killers burned eight of the bodies.

In all, there were four men, five women and seven children slaughtered. Their hands had been bound behind their backs before they were killed, Nkala said.

The raid occurred Wednesday night, and a 13-year-old girl, Laura Russell, and 6-year-old boy, Matthew Marais, were able to escape to notify authorities.

Simon Rhodes, who once lived on the mission farm and is now pastor of an Assemblies of God church in Bulawayo, was called out to identify victims for authorities.

The Americans were identified as David Emerson, 35, and Karen Sharon Iversdahl, 34, both originally from Montana and planning to marry in a few weeks.

The farm mission was operated as the Pentecostal Community for Reconciliation.

The rebels left an abusive letter in broken English denouncing both British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Mugabe and saying that all people from the capitalist West should leave the country.

(In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said, “The United States shares the outrage of the government of Zimbabwe at this wanton murder of missionaries.”)

The mission community has two adjoining farms, Adams and Olive Tree, which cover 10,000 acres, and Nkala indicated that tension over land rights may have been a factor in the massacre.

Land rights have been a chronic problem in Zimbabwe since its late 19th-Century colonization, when white settlers drove the native Shona and Ndebele tribes into less fertile regions. A serious drought in southern Matabeleland province this year has led to a shortage of grazing pasture, leaving black farmers desperate to find pasture for their cattle.