Outside a Lutheran church compound in the capital where hundreds of refugees from Liberia's civil war were massacred, passers-by appeared numb at the sight of rows of corpses.
Government soldiers stormed the church grounds before dawn Monday and slaughtered 600 people, witnesses said. Most were children and women, and the heads of many were smashed open or blown to pieces by bullets.The government denied responsibility. A spokesman for President Samuel Doe said rebels dressed as government soldiers staged the attack.
The victims belonged to the Gio and Mano tribes, which have supported the rebels seeking to overthrow Doe. Most of Doe's troops are from his Krahn tribe and the Mandingo tribe.
This massacre of civilians was not the first in this 7-month-old war. On May 30, government soldiers attacked U.N. headquarters in Monrovia, where hundreds of Gios and Manos had taken refuge. They abducted about 30 men and teenage boys, and most of the bodies were found later on a beach outside the capital.
The rebels also have been accused of killing civilians.
But none of the attacks has been on the scale of Monday's massacre. The Lutheran World Federation in Geneva said Tuesday it was "horrified and deeply grieved" by the incident, and it urged the United Nations to intervene in the civil war. The federation is an umbrella for 106 Lutheran churches worldwide.
Relief workers feared many of the wounded would die. A spokesman for the Belgian group Doctors Without Borders, which is running the only field hospital operating in Monrovia, said Monday night they had not been able to get to the church.
In Washington, White House deputy press secretary Stephen Hart said Monday that U.S. Embassy officials in Monrovia had confirmed that government troops slaughtered at least 200 people at the church compound. There was no independent confirmation of the 600 dead figure.
The embattled president remained in his heavily fortified beachfront presidential mansion, his troops battling rebel forces advancing on two fronts in the capital.
At the church, the floor was covered with blood and the ceiling was riddled with bullet holes.
The bodies of women were strewn about with children still wrapped in shawls on their backs. More bodies were huddled under the pews where people tried to hide, and in corners. Others lay draped across the church altar.
People who said they escaped the attack said about 30 soldiers blasted the church door down with machine guns at about 2 a.m. when the refugees were sleeping. They said the troops then fired on about 2,000 people.
Bodies of some people apparently killed while trying to flee were hanging from window frames of the church building, said one person who visited the camp.