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BRUSSELS, March 31 (AFP) - Rwandan intelligence officials have arrested human rights activist Fidele Kanyabugoyi and seized papers at his Kigali home concerning massacres of Rwanda's Tutsi minority, a rights group stated here Tuesday.
Kanyabugori, legal representative of the Kanyarwanda association, was detained in the Rwandan capital Sunday by security forces who also took press cuttings and other documents on the killing of Tutsi people in the past two years, according to the Committee for the Respect of Human Rights and Democracy in Rwanda (CRDDR).
France's Le Monde newspaper on March 14 quoted Kanyabugori as telling the daily: "The only way to reduce ethnic problems is to install a democratic regime".
In a letter to the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana dated January 1 and signed by a number of Tutsi survivors, Kanyabugori had also called for an independent enquiry into the massacre of Tutsis early last year, three months after Tutsi rebels invaded Rwanda from neighbouring Uganda.
The majority Hutus early in March attacked Tutsis in the southeast of the small, densely populated mountain nation in east central Africa. Officials said 152 people died and more than 13,000 have refused to return to their homes, but local sources put the death toll at several hundred.
The CRDDR, based in the former colonial capital Brussels, on Tuesday released Kanyabugori's letter, in which he wrote: "More than 11 months have passed and the ... miraculously fortunate survivors of the holocaust have still not been approached to give their evidence".
Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR) rebels, mainly exiled Tutsis, many of whom had served in the Ugandan army, have remained active particularly in the north of the country, where national radio said they last week killed at least 18 people and injured many others in a mortar attack on a village.
The Rwandan government has taken recent steps towards introducing multi-party democracy, but has accused one of the opposition parties of being a front for the rebels.
jh/nb/fc AFP AFP SEQN-0194
