Mortar fire and tracer rounds lit up the night sky over Rwanda's capital early Thursday in what a U.N. official called the worst fighting yet in the battle for control of the city.
"It was small arms fire and mortar shells, pounding every part of the city, through the dark, and it is continuing this morning," U.N. spokesman Abdul Kabia said by phone from Kigali.Kabia said U.N. troops trying to negotiate peace and protect civilians from ethnic slaughter in Rwanda had not been able to reach the center of the city or other parts to learn whether there were casualties.
He said they were surprised by the ferocity of the fighting and did not know the reason for it.
"We've had nights of sporadic shooting, but last night it was continuous. You could hear shots from everywhere - the center, and including the area where we operate" on Kigali's outskirts near the airport, Kabia said.
Foreign observers said they suspected the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front may be trying to make a final push to take the capital from government troops.
The battle followed two days of heavy daylight fighting in which four U.N. soldiers were wounded, two seriously.
The United Nations already has reduced its peacekeeping force from 2,500 to under 500. The blue-helmeted troops are lightly armed, and their mandate does not allow them to become involved in the fighting, which has killed at least 100,000 Rwandans and sent at least 1.3 million fleeing their homes.
The fighting began after the president, a member of the majority Hutu ethnic group, died in a mysterious plane crash April 6. The next day, the presidential guard, renegade army units and civilian militias went on a killing spree in the capital, murdering Cabinet ministers, civilians of the minority Tutsi group and U.N. peacekeepers.
The slaughter led Tutsi rebels to resume a civil war that had been on hold since a peace agreement was signed last August.
Kabia said U.N. military officers had gone Thursday to try again to negotiate the evacuation of some 300 people, mostly Tutsis, under guard of U.N. soldiers at the Milles Collines Hotel.
"The government is insisting that if we try to move them out, they have to be accompanied by government forces," Kabia said. "We think it will help because if we have a convoy of government soldiers, they will have to confront the other renegade elements and militia."
U.N. commanders also are trying to move 6,000 others from a church that was shelled last weekend and from a school.
Kabia said the United Nations was still getting other reports of ethnic massacres in the areas of Butare, Gitarama and in Cyangugu in southwestern Rwanda.
On Wednesday, Amnesty International endorsed greater U.N. involvement and criticized the "failure of the international community to effectively deal with the horrendous massacres."