Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 7, 1993 TAG: 9306070048
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ABIDJAN, IVORY COAST LENGTH: Medium
The massacre was the worst in Liberia's 3 1/2-year-old civil war since government soldiers killed 600 members of rival tribes in Monrovia in 1990.
"They cut throats, they cut heads, threw out brains, broke legs, and shot, so many bullet wounds that you cannot understand why," Augustine Mahiga, representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in a telephone interview.
He spoke after viewing what he called "scenes more horrible than any movie I've ever seen." He said the killings began just after midnight Saturday and must have lasted for two hours. Most victims were women and children, he said.
Mahiga said witnesses blamed guerrilla leader Charles Taylor's rebels, who started the war in 1989. Since then, Liberia has collapsed into chaos and more than half of the 2.3 million people are refugees.
But Taylor denied responsibility for the massacre, telling the British Broadcasting Corp. that it was another attempt to give his army "a bad name."
He said he believed the killings were carried out, as the pretext for an offensive against him, by Liberian army troops and another rebel faction, with the consent of a West African intervention force sent to end Liberia's 3 1/2-year war.
"It is all a part of this deal where they are planning a massive, a big push [against me] . . . and they are trying to find a pretext for this murder and mayhem they want to carry out," Taylor said.
The massacre came two weeks after the West African army said it intercepted a radio message from Taylor to one of his commanders, in which he allegedly ordered a "reign of terror" against refugees on the front lines of Liberia's 3 1/2-year-old civil war.
Taylor denied he sent the message, but Mahiga and others who have listened to it said they recognized the guerrilla chief's distinctive baritone.
Mahiga said he and others estimated some 300 people were killed and 765 wounded Sunday at Kata, a camp of refugees set up at the workers' compound of an abandoned Firestone complex that is the world's biggest rubber plantation.
He said survivors told him that Taylor's guerrillas had come looking for food just after midnight Saturday, a day after the United Nations had distributed rice in the area.
"They collected the rice, then went on an orgy of killing of mutilation . . . . They went from house to house killing entire families in the most horrifying manner," he said.
A second refugee camp was attacked and the death toll may be much higher, he said.
Mahiga said people were speculating that the rebels were using body parts for witchcraft, which is common in West Africa.
by CNB