200 More U.N. Troops Lost in Sierra Leone

The United Nations lost contact with 200 more peacekeepers in central Sierra Leone, officials said Saturday, the same region where rebels are holding hundreds of other U.N. staff members.

If the Zambian peacekeepers have been captured by Revolutionary United Front rebels, it would bring the number of U.N. personnel being held by the RUF to about 500. Four Kenyan U.N. peacekeepers are believed to have been killed in clashes, which began Monday.

It was not clear if the taking of captives was haphazard or part of a larger rebel plan.

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard, speaking in New York, said the United Nations was unsure of the exact status of the 200, who had been based near the central city of Makeni. The RUF captured about 275 U.N. troops last week.

But the rebels insisted they were neither holding hostages nor launching an offensive. The missing U.N. soldiers are simply lost in the jungle, they say.

“These people, they are foreigners here, they do not know the terrain,” RUF leader Foday Sankoh said in an interview in front of his heavily guarded home. “My men are helping to look for them.”

The U.N.’s Eckhard said late Saturday that two to three clusters of rebels had been spotted from the air at Masiaka moving toward Freetown. But about 30 minutes later, Eckhard said he could not confirm the information he had received from Freetown.

Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer confirmed that there had been a battle between rebels and U.N. forces, but he had no further information.

Clearly, the mission was in crisis, and officials at U.N. headquarters in New York stressed that information from the field tended to be fragmentary.

Dozens of Western aid workers and missionaries, meanwhile, were gathering with packed suitcases in the parking lots of Freetown’s two major hotels, seeking protection and potential evacuation.