Burundi’s last active rebel group shelled the capital, Bujumbura, overnight, injuring at least eight civilians, officials said on Thursday.
This was the second such attack in less than a month. Both have occurred since the rebel group and the government began peace talks in Tanzania.
Fighters of the National Liberation Forces (FNL) lobbed shells into Bujumbura’s southern residential suburb on Wednesday night, damaging property, an administrative official in the area said.
”The FNL lobbed 15, 60mm mortars [into] Musaga, injured eight people and caused material damage,” the official told Agence France-Presse.
Two of the wounded were taken to a Bujumbura hospital in a critical condition — a woman who had been disembowelled woman and a teenager with a severed limb, witnesses said.
Shells also hit a military base, prompting the soldiers to respond with heavy gunfire, army spokesperson Adolphe Manirakiza said.
Last month at least one person was injured when the FNL attacked two districts in the capital, just a day after the peace talks began.
The talks opened on May 29 with calls from the South African mediators and the Tanzanian hosts for the recalcitrant rebels and the government to bring to an end to more than 12 years of bloody civil war. The conflict has claimed 300 000 lives.
The FNL is the only one of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups not to have signed a 2000 peace deal. That deal last year brought into office a new power-sharing government headed by a former Hutu guerrilla commander.
Burundi’s war erupted in 1993 with the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected president — a member of the Hutu majority — by members of the army, which was then dominated by the Tutsi minority. — Sapa-AFP