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BUJUMBURA, March 18 (AFP) - Two people have been killed and dozens wounded in a grenade attack on a market place in central Bujumbura, state radio said Saturday.
The grenade exploded early Friday in a parking lot at the central Bujumbura market, killing one person on the spot and fatally wounding another, the radio said.
Police said that immediately after the attack they arrested a man in possession of a grenade. The man, who the police failed to identify had a grenade with him, they said. A third device had been thrown onto the roof of the market, they added.
The grenade attack came Friday as state officials turned out for the burial of the late Energy Minister Ernest Kabusheyeme, shot dead by unknown assailants as he was getting into his car outside a city centre shop.
The killing sparked fears of an upsurge in the near constant round of political murders linked to ethnic feuding.
In just one of the latest incidents, authorities said Saturday the former mayor of Bujumbura, Colonel Lucien Sakubu, who was killed Monday after being kidnapped in a suburb of the capital, will be buried Sunday in a cemetery at Mpanda, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the capital.
His burnt and disembowelled body was found Wednesday in the northern Kinama district.
Burundi, which has majority Hutus and a minority of Tutsis, has a history of ethnic violence since independence in 1962. Moderate Hutu political leaders, who took power in the country for the first time in 1993, are battling extremist Tutsi and Hutu opposition fueled by the arrival in the country of thousands of refugees from last year's fighting in neighbouring Rwanda.
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AFP AFP
