UN - Mid-August Massacre of Refugees in Burundi Unable to Pin Blame

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http://allafrica.com/stories/200410260074.html

UN News Service (New York)

October 25, 2004
Posted to the web October 26, 2004

A United Nations team probing the mid-August slaying of Congolese Tutsi refugees in Burundi has not been able to identify the perpetrators and is recommending a further investigation of the brutal overnight massacre which left 160 people dead.

Despite extensive research in both Burundi and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UN investigators are "at this stage unable to conclusively identify who authored, financed, or carried out the killings" of the Banyamulenge at the Gatumba transit centre located just inside Burundi's border.

At the same time, the team "collected sufficient information about this grave crime to recommend a thorough judicial inquiry at both the national level, led by the Government of Burundi, with the full cooperation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and the international level, led by the International Criminal Court."

In a letter accompanying the report, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed his grave concern about crimes against civilians in both Burundi and DRC. "As the Security Council has noted in several of its resolutions and presidential statements, impunity must be brought to an end and perpetrators of crimes such as the one described in the attached report must be brought to justice," he says."