2 Americans Among 8 Slain in Uganda Forest

Eight adventure tourists in Uganda, including an American couple, were killed by their Rwandan captors in the rain forest made famous by “Gorillas in the Mist,” and a survivor said Tuesday that the rebels hacked some victims to death with machetes.

In Washington, State Department spokesman James Foley called the Monday attack “about as abominable a crime as one can imagine--hostage-taking [and] coldblooded murder of hostages.” Four Britons and two New Zealanders were also killed. Six hostages, an American among them, were rescued.

Survivor Mark Ross, an American pilot and tour guide, said ethnic Hutu rebels, remnants of a militia responsible for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, brutally killed the foreign tourists after attacking their campsites in a remote mountain region of southwestern Uganda on Sunday and dragging them into the dense jungle.

“The ones I saw had their heads crushed in and deep slashes with machetes,” Ross told reporters in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. “They were executed.”

Reflecting on his description of the bodies, he added: “Execution seems too organized a term.”

Four men and four women were killed in the attack.

Ross said he and five tourists--two Britons, one Canadian, one Swiss and one New Zealander--were freed Monday evening with a message warning the international community to cut off all ties with Rwanda’s government.

The Hutu rebels fled Rwanda after that country’s genocide, which left more than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. The rebels are angry at Uganda for supporting the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government.

Another survivor released earlier, American tourist Linda Adams, reportedly of the Bay Area town of Alamo, said the rebels had deliberately singled out Americans and Britons as hostages.

But she also said the rebels treated the hostages well in the first hours of their ordeal and let her go after she feigned an asthma attack.

The rebels initially abducted 31 tourists Sunday. This followed a shootout in which a Ugandan game warden and three rangers were killed as they tried to protect the tourists.

Seventeen tourists were freed or escaped almost immediately afterward. The rest were herded into the mountains by at least 120 rebels.

Just at the edge of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, the camps targeted in the attack form the base of operations for the majority of tourists who travel to East Africa to track the elusive mountain gorillas. The camps, only a few miles from the Congolese border, have not been the target of violence in the almost 10 years since the forest was made into a national park.

Indeed, as fighting in neighboring Rwanda and Congo made mountain journeys from those countries impossible, Uganda has seen its own tourist industry blossom in the past five years, with enough eager visitors to support luxury accommodations and bare-bones campsites at Bwindi.

Ross’ account of how the hostages died clashed with that of Ugandan police spokesman Eric Naigambi, who told Associated Press that there was a shootout during a rescue operation staged by the Ugandan authorities.

The “tourists were killed in the cross-fire during the rescue operation,” Naigambi said.

The State Department’s Foley rejected that scenario, saying: “The victims were killed by their captors as the group marched through the forest. It’s our understanding that all eight of the dead were murdered by the hostage-takers. There was no cross-fire.”

The State Department warned Americans to stay away from western Uganda and the gorilla parks for the time being. David Denny, a State Department spokesman, identified the dead Americans as Rob Haubner, 48, and Susan G. Miller, 42, both employees of the computer company Intel Corp. in Hillsboro, Ore. Intel spokesman Bill Calder said they were husband and wife, on their third trip to Africa and traveling with another couple from the company.

U.S. officials said early today that a team of FBI agents had landed in Uganda to investigate the attack.

“There is an FBI team here. They arrived to help with the investigation,” U.S. Embassy spokesman Virgil Bordeen told Reuters news agency.

On Tuesday, Foley and White House spokesman David Leavy said the United States would assist in the investigation if Uganda requested its help.

“We will certainly work tirelessly to apprehend those responsible and bring them to justice,” Leavy said.

“Of course, this is in the province of the Ugandan authorities now to pursue these hostage-takers and, hopefully, capture them and bring them to justice,” Foley said.

At the same time, Foley said Washington does not believe that the Rwandan government bears any responsibility for the crime.

“The Rwandan government itself is struggling with the remnants of the genocidal groups that perpetrated genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and they are struggling with this very same problem,” Foley said.

The site of the abductions is the starting point for visitors hoping to glimpse the 320 mountain gorillas that remain along the border mountains’ slopes.

The 1988 film “Gorillas in the Mist” about researcher Dian Fossey was based on her book of the same name and starred Sigourney Weaver as the woman who risked her life in Rwanda trying to save the gorillas from extinction.

Tourism operators in the region worried about the young industry’s ability to withstand the negative attention--and the local population’s ability to weather a lull in a business that has funded schools, clinics and housing.

“Uganda is a beautiful country with beautiful people, but it doesn’t have that traditional confidence,” said Mel Gormley, whose Mantana camp is near the base of the mountains and was spared in the attack.

“Uganda has had its troubles in the past, and I think it’s a shame if an incident like this--as serious as it is--is reported in such a way that people will think Uganda is in turmoil,” he said. “Uganda is not in turmoil.”

Times staff writers Norman Kempster in Washington and Abigail Goldman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.