Mon Nov 10, 8:44 AM ET
BUJUMBURA (AFP) - Five people including a soldier were killed in Burundi's capital when a Hutu rebel group shelled the president's residence and mounted a ground attack in a show of force, witnesses and officials told AFP.
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The soldier was killed while on duty at the presidential palace in Kiriri, in the east of the city, during a bombardment that also wounded two men guarding the US military attache's house and damaged the Chinese embassy, military and government sources said.
The attack was claimed by the National Liberation Forces (FNL), a Hutu rebel group, and took place a fortnight before the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), a larger rebel group which has signed a ceasefire and power-sharing deal with the government, was due to join the ranks of an enlarged administration.
"The army and the FDD claimed to have chased us from Bujumbura Rural (the province surrounding the capital). That's a lie we have just exposed by a military action," FNL spokesman Pasteur Habimana told AFP by telephone.
"If the army sets fire to one more house in the hills or if the FDD rapes one more girl in rural Bujumbura we are going to come back down into the capital," he added.
"Ndayizeye is a man like any other, he can die like any other," said Habimana, without saying whether President Domitien Ndayizeye, also a Hutu, had been specifically targetted in the rebel group's attack.
Also overnight, four people including a young woman died when their houses in the north of Bujumbura caught fire during clashes involving the FNL.
In Gihosha, a northern district of Bujumbura, "seven shells landed without causing material damage," said army spokesman Colonel Augustin Nzabampema.
Earlier Monday, the spokesman had told AFP that five people had been killed in the FNL attacks.
"We thought it was just attack using mortar shells. But the FNL fired 16 shells on eastern districts, where one person was killed. They also launched a ground attack at Kamenge and Kinama, where four people were killed," according to Sylvestre Rutwe, the city official in charge of security.
The ground attack "began around midnight and ended three hours later," said local government official Gilbert Buranje, adding that the FNL rebels used rocket launchers, grenades and machine guns.
Several residents said FDD sympathisers had put up fierce resistance in Kamenge.
The two rebel groups have clashed since September to the west of the capital. Dozens of civilians have been killed in the fighting and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes on the hills overlooking the city.
The new enlarged government incorporating FDD leaders is due to take shape on November 23.
FDD fighters are also set to win posts in the army.
The FNL has consistently refused to enter into ceasefire talks with the transitional, power-sharing government, and has repeatedly insisted it will only deal with the current Tutsi leadership of the army.
More than 300,000 people have been killed in Burundi's civil war, which broke out in October 1993, when the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, from the large Hutu majority, was assassinated during a coup bid.
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and the army dominated by minority Tutsis.
