Gunfire and explosions echoed across Rwanda's capital again Friday in a convulsion of violence by rampaging soldiers and gunmen who reportedly killed the acting premier, 11 U.N. peacekeepers, about 20 priests and nuns and dozens of aid workers.
Three Cabinet ministers and two human rights activists also were reported abducted during the bloodshed in Kigali, which erupted Thursday several hours after the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi died in a plane crash. The Rwandan government said the plane was shot down.President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprian Ntaryamira, were returning from regional talks on ending decades of strife in their nations between the majority Hutu ethnic group and minority Tutsis.
Communications with the central African nation were difficult, and it remained unclear if any group was in control of Kigali. Much of the city was reported without electricity.
Many of the killings were blamed on the Hutu-dominated presidential guard, but armed bands of young men also were seen roaming the streets. In addition, U.N. sources said members of a former rebel movement that was mainly Tutsi broke out of a U.N. compound and reportedly were fighting presidential guards.
A European speaking by telephone Friday said gunfire had raged nearly nonstop since dawn Thursday. "It's out of the question to go into the streets, because there's too many armed gangs," he said.
Tracers lit up the sky overnight, and heavy arms were being fired, he said, insisting on anonymity.
The Paris office of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders said Friday that its teams in Kigali reported the city's hospitals and clinics overflowing with wounded. Other teams reported ethnic fighting in southern Rwanda, the group said.
More than 50 Rwandans, including ministers, high-ranking civil servants and their families took refuge in the French Embassy. They were being protected by about 30 French soldiers.
The United States planned to close its embassy in Kigali, and the State Department was looking for ways to evacuate the 250 Americans in Rwanda. Belgium planned to send a plane to neighboring Burundi to help out with any evacuation of its 1,500 citizens in Rwanda.
Acting Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyamana was dragged from a U.N. compound and killed by presidential guards in front of U.N. volunteers Thursday, U.N. sources said. She had escaped to the compound after soldiers disarmed her U.N. guards when she left home, the sources said.
Ten of the slain U.N. soldiers were Belgians guarding Uwi-ling-iya-ma-na, said a communique from the Belgian defense ministry in Brussels.
The men were surrounded, disarmed, taken to a military camp, then tortured and killed, their commander, Belgian Col. Luc Marchal, told RTBF public radio in Belgium.
The U.N. soldiers were part of a 2,500-man peacekeeping force sent to administer a peace accord between the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and the Tutsi rebel army.
The estimated 700 presidential guards are dominated by Hutu hard-liners, who have been leery of the peace accord.
Some U.N. diplomats said they believed the presidential guard was attempting to stop others in the government from claiming the presidency in Rwanda.
Soldiers killed 11 Roman Catholic nuns and eight priests, all of them African, said Jose M. de Vera, a spokesman at Jesuit headquarters in Rome. Three Belgian Jesuits were spared, he said.
A Papal Nuncio source reached by telephone from Paris said 22 clergymen and women, all Rwandans, had been slain since the outbreak of fighting. Churches in Kigali "are full of people looking for refuge," the source said.
"Several dozen" local employees of Doctors Without Borders and other aid workers were killed by the military, many in cold blood in front of other aid workers, the group's spokeswoman, Anouk Dela-for-trie, said Friday in Belgium. "The fighting and plundering in Kigali continues unabated," she said.
Presidential guards also kidnapped three Cabinet ministers, U.N. officials said.
Sources from the U.N. Development Program in New York said there were reports that two Cabinet ministers and the president of the Supreme Court had been killed. Radio France Inter-na-tion-ale cited unidentified diplomats as saying that Labor and Social Affairs Minister Landouald Ndasingwa had been killed.
Human Rights Watch in Washington said rights activist Monique Mujawamaliya had been taken by troops and expressed fears for her life. It said she had been threatened by security police previously because she exposed abuses.
Activist Charles Shamukiga was also abducted, London-based Amnesty International said.