Seven killed in Uganda rebel attack - residents
By Gabriel Khan
LIRA, Uganda, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Rebels killed seven people including three women they burned alive on Saturday in a rampage across northern Uganda, residents said on Sunday.
The three women were killed at Atwoki trading centre just outside Lira town when rebels barricaded them in a hut and set it ablaze in the early hours of Saturday. The rebels also shot dead a policeman and beat three villagers to death, the residents said.
There was no immediate word on the incident from the army, which has said scores of civilians were killed by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on Thursday and Friday in similar attacks on villages near Lira, a town of up to 100,000 people.
The rebels are feared for their brutality and for abducting thousands of children for use as sex slaves and front-line fighters in the east African country's 17-year-old civil war.
The guerrillas are led by self-proclaimed mystic and prophet Joseph Kony, a former altar boy said to talk to angels who command him to kill.
The LRA says it wants to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni but it has never spelt out its demands publicly.
A priest who declined to be identified said that the Atwoki attacks brought to more than 60 the estimated number of people murdered since Thursday. He said that fellow priests attempting to mediate with the rebels said they had been enraged by the army's October 29 killing of LRA number two Charles Tabuley.
The army blames Tabuley for several massacres of civilians in northern and eastern Uganda over the past 16 months.
Thousands of terrified civilians have fled a number of villages to seek shelter in and around Lira town, the main settlement in the district of the same name.
The government deployed 14,000 troops backed by helicopter gunships and tanks against the rebels last year, but LRA attacks have since intensified and pushed further south towards Kampala.
PACT WITH SUDAN
Sudan and Uganda in October renewed a pact to cooperate in removing rebels from southern Sudan. The deal allowing Ugandan troops to pursue the LRA in southern Sudan expired in September.
Uganda accused Sudan in September of resuming the support it once gave to the rebels. Khartoum denied the accusations and said it would deal seriously with rogue military officers it suspected were collaborating with the LRA.
Ian Clarke, a Kampala-based doctor who tended the wounded in Lira last week, reported a 14-year-old patient as saying rebels in an attack on October 31 had burned her mother, two sisters and a brother to death in a village 20 km (12 miles) away.
"They had rounded up the people and tied their hands together, then they made them lie down and placed thatch from the huts on top of them. They took paraffin from the lamps, poured it on the thatch and set it alight, making a funeral pyre, but their victims were alive when they lit it," Clarke wrote in an article in the Sunday Vision newspaper.
(Additional reporting by Paul Busharizi and William Maclean)
11/09/03 05:52 ET
