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NAIROBI, March 11 (AFP) - Tribal massacres have claimed 60 lives in Rwanda since they broke out last week between the majority Hutus and the Tutsi people, Interior Minister Faustin Munyazesa said Wednesday.
The minister gave the new toll during a meeting between President Juvenal Habyarimana and Western ambassadors in Kigali, a diplomatic source reached from Nairobi said.
General-Major Habyarimana blamed the killing on largely Tutsi rebels who invaded the country in October 1990, but the interior minister said only one Hutu was among the victims, a looter killed by a gendarme.
Ambassadors from Belgium, other European Community countries, the United States, Canada and Switzerland expressed their serious concern
at developments to Rwanda's ruler.
They called for an impartial investigation
into the massacre of Tutsis.
One of the dead was an Italian nun, Antonia Locatelli, who was shot dead late Monday in Nyamata in the southeastern Bugesera region as she tried to protect children in a school she ran, Radio Rwanda has reported.
Some 6,000 Tutsis have fled their homes in the hill country since the violence erupted last Wednesday, amid reports that many houses have been razed to the ground.
Habyarimana told diplomats that 2,500 (Hutu) peasant farmers have been killed and 3,500 mutilated
in savage crimes
since October 1990 by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).
He also spoke of Ugandan responsibilities
.
The rebels, including many Tutsi exiles who had served in the Ugandan army, have been waging a guerrilla campaign in the volcanic regions of northern Rwanda.
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