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

DATE: MONDAY, April 11, 1994                   TAG: 9404110102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press
DATELINE: KIGALI, RWANDA                                LENGTH: Medium

CEASE-FIRE FAILS IN RWANDA DOCTORS SAY PATIENTS SLAUGHTERED

With as many as 10,000 dead in their capital, warring tribes in Rwanda resumed fighting after a brief cease-fire Sunday as Americans and other foreigners reached the relative safety of neighboring Burundi.

At a hospital in Kigali, doctors claimed, soldiers slaughtered at least 100 patients in their beds.

Elsewhere in the city, bodies were strewn in the streets.

The fighting follows decades of old struggle between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups.

Fires burned on the outskirts of Kigali, aid warehouses were looted and sketchy reports surfacing of a massacre at a Roman Catholic Franciscan mission.

The commander of 400 Belgian troops assigned to a U.N. peacekeeping force said Sunday morning that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dominated by members of the minority Tutsis, and the Rwandan army, dominated by the Hutus, had stopped shooting.

Last night, however, Col. Luc Marchal said the fighting had escalated. "Expatriate [Belgians] are remaining in their homes," he said. "Belgians are among the casualties, but [in Kigali] this seems to be more because they have been trapped in cross-fires by warring groups and not because they have been specifically attacked."

Rebel leader Theogene Rudasingwa said in remarks broadcast by a French television network that "we have little option" but to press southward toward Kigali.

President Clinton said Sunday that the last of the all Americans who wished to leave had reached or were about to reach Burundi.

Reports broadcast by Tanzanian radio and monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp. said ethnic violence was erupting in Burundi.

The violence has flared in the wake of a plane crash Wednesday that killed President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and President Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi. The Rwandan government says the plane was shot down.

In Kigali, Eric Bertin, of French Doctors Without Borders, said that when he and colleagues arrived at a hospital Sunday, they found that an estimated 100 or more of the patients they had treated had been killed by soldiers overnight.

Many of the patients remained in beds in tents around the hospital.

by CNB