Liberia’s health minister on Thursday reported that between 200 and 300 civilians killed and 1 000 wounded in a two-day battle for the country’s besieged capital, and morgue workers described mortuaries filled to overflowing.
Soldiers commandeered private vehicles to collect more broken bodies from the streets of Monrovia at daylight on Thursday, working to a backdrop of pounding rain and crackling gunfire.
Monrovia was on edge but calmer early on Thursday, with the shelling, rockets and frantic refugee movements of the past two days silenced.
However, there was no indication of retreat by rebels fighting to take the city, and unconfirmed reports had rebels sighted around the port, a key objective well into Monrovia.
Rebels are driving home a three-year war to oust warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor, a newly indicted UN-war-crimes suspect who launched the West African nation into 14 years of conflict in 1989.
Early on Thursday, Health Minister Peter Coleman said that the past two days of fighting in the city had killed between 200-300 civilians, and injured 1 000.
There was no word on government or rebel casualties.
Mortuary workers put the civilian toll in the ”hundreds,” describing morgues stacked with dead.
Coleman said the dead included at least nine Liberians killed when rockets struck an evacuated US diplomatic residential compound on Wednesday. Thousands of Monrovia’s residents had taken refuge in the compound, which is across the street from the heavily guarded US Embassy.
The US State Department confirmed late on Tuesday that two embassy workers, one a gardener, one a guard, and both Liberians, had been killed at the residential compound.
In neighbouring Sierra Leone, UN helicopters and crews were on standby in the capital, Freetown.
UN spokesman Patrick Coker said crews were on ”very short notice” to fly to Monrovia for evacuation for remaining UN workers. French military helicopters and a French warship evacuated 530 foreigners from Monrovia earlier this month, when rebels first pushed into Monrovia. – Sapa-AP