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KIGALI, March 24 (AFP) - The remains of former prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and other senior Rwandan politicians assassinated last April will be buried April 7, which has been declared a national day of mourning, Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu announced Friday.
The burial site is to be Rebero, a hill dominating the Rwandan capital, Kigali, where former president Juvenal Habyarimana had built a hotel.
On the evening of April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana, a member of the Hutu ethnic majority, was killed his plane shot down as it flew into Kigali.
His death sparked a massacre of minority Tutsis and moderate opposition Hutus, including Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, who was assassinated by soldiers of the presidential guard.
At least 500,000 people were killed in the genocide.
Many of those who died in the slaughter have not yet been given funeral services and their bodies have been disenterred from common graves for a dignified reburial.
The April 7 day of mourning will allow "everyone to look back and think about the lessons so that this never happens again in Rwanda", Twagiramungu told a press conference.
He denied rumors circulating in Rwanda that Tutsis planned to use the occasion to wreak revenge on the Hutus. The authorities, he said, "are here to prevent acts like this."
Twagiramungu added that 270,000 refugees, nearly all of them Hutus, were still living in camps in the Gikongoro region of southwest Rwanda.
"These people are afraid to go home," he said, "either because they were involved in the genocide or for fear of arbitrary arrest."
More than two million Rwandan Hutus are living as refugees in neighboring countries for the same reasons.
mgu/at/meb AFP AFP
