Citation
BUJUMBURA, April 8 (Reuter) - Red Cross officials on Friday reported up
to 400 bodies in just one hospital in the Rwandan capital Kigali and
said the death toll in a two-day orgy of ethnic violence there could
run into thousands.
Our medical coordinator visited the central hospital in Kigali and
found it overflowing with dead and wounded. There were 300-400 corpses
in the hospital, the morgue was full,
Patrick Gasser, deputy head of
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) there, said by
telephone from Kigali.
Gasser told a Reuter reporter in Bujumbura, capital of neighbouring
Burundi, that a further 80 people, many seriously wounded, were waiting
to be treated. There were only two doctors in the whole hospital,
he
said.
Earlier, the head of the ICRC in Rwanda said the number of victims who
died in fighting in Kigali in the past two days probably ran into
thousands.
There have probably been thousands of dead in Kigali between Wednesday
night and today,
Philippe Gaillard told France Inter radio in Paris.
There has been non-stop shooting in virtually all the districts of
Kigali since Wednesday evening,
he said.
Gaillard said he had been to Kigali's main hospital where there were
350 bodies in the morgue and an incredible
number of injured people
lying in corridors.
These are brothers killing each other -- there has been an urban civil
war raging in Kigali for the last two days.
The situation in Kigali
was totally chaotic, totally disastrous and incredibly painful
, he
said.
The French medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres said several
thousand wounded needed urgent treatment in Kigali's central hospital,
in dispensaries and in city streets. The hospital is overstretched by
several hundred wounded, many of whom need surgery,
a statement said.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
