150 Hutus Killed in Burundi Village, U.S. Envoy Says

At least 150 Hutus, mostly women and children, were slain in a single village in northeastern Burundi by attackers who shot or bludgeoned them to death, the U.S. ambassador said Monday.

The killings took place between Wednesday and Friday in the village of Gasorwe, Ambassador Robert Krueger said. The regional death toll from killings could be 450 over the past two weeks.

The killings didn’t appear to be related to an exodus of Rwandan refugees last week from nearby camps. Burundi and Rwanda suffer from similar tensions between Hutus and Tutsis, but diplomats don’t expect violence here on the scale of the ethnic massacres that cost 500,000 lives last year in Rwanda.

Krueger said he learned about the latest slayings Friday and visited the area Saturday, touring hospitals and talking with parents of children who had been beaten to death.

“I have no explanation for why people would beat children’s heads with clubs,” he said. “How can you explain something like that? But that is what I saw, children who had their heads beaten in.”

Survivors in Gasorwe, about 70 miles northeast of Bujumbura, the capital, indicated that the attackers wore army uniforms, Krueger said.

In another massacre March 25 in the nearby village of Karosi, more than 100 people were killed, the ambassador said, and up to 200 other people had been killed in the area in the past two weeks.

Burundian President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu, told reporters Monday that the Tutsi-led army was there to protect the people, and he denied it was attacking Hutus.