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KIGALI, Dec 2 (AFP) - Rwanda's government warned Burundi refugees against trouble on Thursday, as 40 arrests were made two days after Hutus turned on Tutsis and Burundi troops massacred a dozen Rwandans in the south of Rwanda.
Interior Minister Faustin Munyazesa and his defence counterpart, Augustin Bizimana, visited the Ngenda district, south of Kigali, where the soldiers also abducted other Rwandan civilians, forced them across the border and killed them.
The total number of dead was not known.
"You have no interest in spreading disorder among the people who have welcomed you with open arms," Munyazesa said during his visit, according to officials.
Five local people from the Tutsi minority were also killed in Ngenda by their Hutu neighbours and more than 300 others fled to take refuge in the neighbouring Roman Catholic parish of Ruhuha.
The refugees, almost all from Burundi's Hutu majority, told the minister that ethnic strife was the doing of a hard core of troublemakers and about 40 arrests were made, officials said.
The two ministers have called on the Burundi government to help repatriate the bodies of those slain across the border and to hunt down the soldiers who carried out the raid.
About 700,000 Burundis fled the small central African country amid ethnic slaughter after soldiers of the Tutsi-dominated army on October 23 assassinated its first Hutu president before abandoning a coup bid.
The Tutsis have traditionally been the overlords in both the densely populated highland nations.
