4 Members of U.N. Human Rights Team Killed in Rwanda Ambush

Gunmen ambushed a U.N. human rights team Tuesday in a Hutu stronghold in southwestern Rwanda, killing four people in the third attack on international aid workers in recent weeks.

Two human rights monitors, a Briton and a Cambodian, and two Rwandan local employees were shot dead. A fifth person, an interpreter, was wounded.

In Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Jose Ayala Lasso condemned the killings and ordered monitors working in the western part of the country to evacuate to Kigali, the capital. There are 139 U.N. human rights monitors in Rwanda, about half of them in the field.

The monitoring operation, which began after government-sponsored genocide resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 people in 1994, is intended to investigate claims of human rights abuse among Rwanda’s 7 million people.

From April to July 1994, gangs organized by the extremist Hutu government engaged in the bloody slaughter of minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

At the United Nations in New York, Secretary-General Kofi Annan was said to be shocked by the killings. His spokesman said the victims had been traveling in clearly marked U.N. vehicles.

The Briton and the Cambodian were carrying out a routine human rights investigation near Karengera, 180 miles southwest of Kigali, when fired on by unidentified assailants, officials said.

The attack is the latest in a series of recent incidents in which foreigners have been targeted. It is the third involving U.N. human rights monitors.

On Jan. 13, members of a U.N. human rights team were beaten and robbed in northwestern Ruhengeri prefecture. A human rights officer sent to investigate the incident two days later was pinned down by gunfire from Hutu insurgents.

On Sunday, a Canadian Roman Catholic priest who had witnessed some of the 1994 killings was shot dead while giving Communion in a northwestern church. On Jan. 18, three Spanish aid workers were killed in their compound in Ruhengeri, Rwanda’s third-largest town.

Western Rwanda is a stronghold for Hutu insurgents, many of whom were involved in the genocide.

Tutsi-led rebels seized power in July 1994 and stopped the killing, prompting the extremists to flee to neighboring countries together with more than 1 million people.

Late last year, hundreds of thousands of refugees returned home, and with them came the insurgents. Violence involving the Hutu extremists and security forces pursuing them has claimed about 500 lives since Jan. 1.