
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994                   TAG: 9404100041
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MULINDI, RWANDA                                LENGTH: Medium

RWANDAN FIGHTING WORSENS U.S. SENDS MARINES TO ASSIST EVACUATION

Convoys of Americans set out Saturday from the blood-soaked Rwandan capital, Kigali, where corpses littered the streets after three days of ethnic killing.

French soldiers took control of the Kigali airport, where a plane evacuated the first French citizens.

Relief officials reported the fiercest fighting yet in Kigali, which has been in anarchy since the presidents of Rwanda and neighboring Burundi - Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprian Ntaryamira - were killed Wednesday in a plane crash the Rwandan government blames on unidentified attackers.

There are 255 Americans, mostly aid workers and missionaries, in the African country.

There was no sign of an end to the bloodletting - the result of a decades-old struggle between minority Tutsis and ruling Hutus. The Hutu-dominated Presidential Guard has been blamed for much of the strife.

Mark Billot, of the Belgian branch of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, told Belgian BRTN radio that 8,000 people have been killed in Kigali. The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that tens of thousands had died throughout Rwanda.

"I have seen hundreds of bodies, including those of four women hacked to death with machetes near a Red Cross storage point. Kigali hospital cannot cope," BBC reporter Lindsey Hilsum said from Kigali.

Relief workers said the violence Saturday was "the heaviest they've seen or heard since the savagery began on Wednesday," said Samantha Bolton, a spokeswoman in Kenya for Doctors Without Borders.

More than 300 U.S. Marines arrived in Burundi to help with the evacuation, U.S. officials in Germany said. Belgium and France sent hundreds of soldiers to Kigali to assist any of the 1,500 Belgians and 600 French who want to leave.

Tutsi rebels claimed to have advanced to within 10 miles of the capital. One commander said they wanted to reinforce 600 rebels battling the Hutu guard and government troops in Kigali.

The rebels, called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, shot mortars from ridges overlooking the government-held town of Biumba, 30 miles north of Kigali. Army troops returned fire from across a valley.

"We believe we should have our right as a people, as a nation. That's why we have been fighting off this dictatorship," Capt. Frank Tega told reporters in Mulindi, 45 miles north of Kigali.

by CNB