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BUJUMBURA, March 22 (AFP) - Clashes between Hutus and Tutsis continued in a mixed neighbourhood of Bujumbura overnight, with the state-owned radio Wednesday reporting four people wounded by gunfire and grenades.
Bursts of automatic fire rang out in the neighbourhood, Bwiza, around the start of the nightly curfew at 7:00 p.m., then gunfire and grenade explosions could be heard in the middle of the night. The dusk-to-dawn curfew ends at 6 a.m.
The radio reported one house burned down.
The violence followed attacks Monday evening by assailants who opened fire in bars and machine-gunned houses, with the toll put at eight dead and 13 wounded, adding to four deaths earlier in the day when gangs of young Hutus and Tutsis confronted each other in the central market.
Soldiers of the Tutsi-dominated army, sent in Tuesday to patrol the streets of Bwiza, were out in force Wednesday morning.
Many outer neighbourhoods in Bujumbura have been "ethnically cleansed," inhabited now solely by members of one tribe, but the central, working class, neighbourhood of Bwiza remains a powderkeg mixture.
The two tribes have been clashing there regularly since the end of last year, raising fears that the tiny central African nation may explode into ethnic civil war, as in neighbouring Rwanda, which has the same ethnic mix, and where more than 500,000 people died in savage fighting and massacres last year.
Bujumbura's central market opened Wednesday morning, but foreign-owned shops were closed in mourning for three Belgians, one of them a four-year-old girl, who were gunned down along with two Burundians Sunday evening as they were returning to the capital from a sporting event.
That attack, generally attributed to Hutu extremists, ignited the following violence.
dn/at/hn/msa AFP AFP
