Rebels killed eight passengers travelling in a minibus in Burundi, witnesses and officials said on Thursday.
Three other passengers wounded in the attack Wednesday died later in hospital, hospital workers said on Thursday.
Army spokesman Col Augustin Nzabampema said the attack happened 23 kilometres north of Bujumbura as the bus from Rwanda headed towards the capital.
Among the dead was Jean-Bosco Rutagenwa, a senator from the Twa community that makes up 1 percent of Burundi’s population of 6,5-million. There are two other Twa senators remaining in the 54-seat upper house.
A survivor, who did not want to be identified, said rebels from the country’s majority Hutu community ordered passengers out of the bus and shot them point-blank in the head.
The Hutu rebels, who are fighting the army dominated by the Tutsi minority in an 8 1/2-year civil war, often attack vehicles travelling in the central African country to loot and kill passengers.
Potien Barutwanayo, a local official where the attack took place, said the attackers were members of the National Liberation Forces, or FNL -one of two main rebel groups fighting the army.
Barutwanayo said the assailants attacked the bus as they fled a military operation at Kibuya hill where the army and rebels have been fighting sporadically for a month.
The war in Burundi broke out in October 1993 after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the central African country’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu. Although a minority, Tutsis have effectively controlled Burundi for all but four months since independence from Belgium in 1962.
Most of the war’s more than 200 000 victims are civilians. A transitional government was inaugurated in November after President Pierre Buyoya’s government, 17 political parties and the National Assembly signed a power-sharing agreement last August; but fighting has continued.
The rebels have refused to recognise the accord, and the agreement does not provide for a cease-fire.
The rebel groups have been meeting with South African mediators who are trying to arrange cease-fire talks with Burundian government and army. But the rebels recently complained that South African mediators aren’t familiar with the situation in Burundi and now they want to deal with Tanzania, Burundi’s neighbour to the east. – Sapa-AP