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NAIROBI, April 11 (AFP) - The leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) Paul Kagame has been killed in an internal power struggle in the rebel movement, Burundi national radio reported Monday in a broadcast monitored here by the BBC.
The private radio station of the pro-Hutu extremist Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) said the RPF chairman was killed after he had staged a bloody palace coup in the rebel movement, Burundi radio said.
The CDR radio said the palace coup also led to the death of RPF chairman Colonel Alexis Kanyarengwe and many other Hutu officials in the rebel movement, which first unsuccessfully invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990.
The RPF is composed mainly of minority Tutsi refugees who fled Rwanda at the height of bloody ethnic fighting in the early 1960s.
Most of them were serving in Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army (NRA) when they absconded with their arms to invade Rwanda in an attempt to overthrow the Hutu-dominated regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana in Kigali.
The rebel movement signed a peace accord with the Rwandan government at the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha in August last year.
But it has now ordered its fighters to march on the Rwandan capital, Kigali, purportedly to end the ongoing carnage resulting from the death in a plane crash on Wednesday night of Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutus.
The Rwandan authorities said the plane was brought down by a rocket near Kigali airport and has pointed an accusing finger the RPF, an accusation the rebels have strongly denied.
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