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Fighting continues near Burundi
11/07/2003 12:39 - (SA)
Bujumbura - Fighting between Burundi government forces and ethnic Hutu rebels who have refused to sign a truce agreement continued near the capital Bujumbura early on Friday, but the clashes were no longer taking place in built-up areas of the city.
Gunfire and mortar explosions could be heard from the region of Gikoto, on the southern fringes of Bujumbura.
On Thursday the army said it had pushed the rebels of the National Liberation Forces (FNL) away from the last suburb they held in the city proper, after clashes that left some 30 rebels dead.
Gilbert Burnage, a local leader in the Rohero neighbourhood, said the rebels managed to fire three mortar shells into the city late on Thursday, but they caused no casualties.
Earlier Thursday mortars fired into the city centre killed at least four civilians. The government blamed that attack on another rebel group, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD).
Meanwhile almost 80% of the capital was without electricity on Friday.
An official at the local power company said the rebels had sabotaged pylons to the north of Bujumbura on Thursday evening.
The FDD, the biggest rebel group in Burundi, was one of three rebel groups that signed a ceasefire agreement in December.
The FNL was not party to that pact and has steadfastly refused to hold talks with the government, even under President Domitien Ndayizeye, a Hutu, who took over as president from Pierre Buyoya, a member of the minority Tutsi group, in April for the second 18 months of an interim power-sharing regime.
Hutu rebels have battled the army, dominated by the rival Tutsi ethnic group, since 1993, in a war that has killed at least 300 000 people in the small central African country.
- AFX
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