BURUNDI'S military leader, Maj Pierre Buyoya, appealed to his ethnically divided nation for calm yesterday following the murder of Archbishop Joachim Ruhuna in an ambush blamed on Hutu rebels.
"I ask people to stay calm and not to commit any acts of vengeance. That is the best way to respect Archbishop Ruhuna and honour his memory," Maj Buyoya said in a national address on state run radio.
"His blood unjustly spilled could be used to heal our own wounds and help us work for peace, he said.
Maj Buyoya, a member of the Tutsi minority, seized power in a military coup on July 25th, ousting Burundi's Hutu president.
Archbishop Ruhuna (62), a Tutsi, had made enemies on both sides of Burundi's ethnic divide by his condemnation of all violence. His death in an ambush on his car near the central town of Gitega on Monday shocked many people in the predominantly Catholic country.
Three other people, including at least one nun, died in the attack and three others are missing. An army spokesman said troops resumed a search of the Mubarizi river and nearby countryside for the archbishop's body, last seen by a deacon burning in his car.
The National Council for the Defence of Democracy, the political wing of the largest Hutu rebel group, denied any role in the killing of the archbishop. "The army killed him because he was very moderate," said Mr Innocent Nimpagaritse, the council's East Africa representative in Nairobi.
More than 150,000 people have been killed in three years of massacres and civil war between, the army and rebels in Burundi, the southern neighbour of Rwanda where 1 million people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in ethnic bloodshed in 1994.
Hutu rebels have almost paralysed north and central parts of Burundi with a string of attacks and ambushes in Bubanza, Kayanza, Ngozi and Gitega provinces in the last two weeks.
Seven civilians and one soldier were killed in an attack on a displaced camp at Ngara commune, in Burundi's north western Bubanza region on Tuesday, the army said. An army spokesman accused Hutu rebels of firing mortar bombs at the camp. Soldiers returned fire and six rebels were killed in the fighting, he added.
The ethnic bloodshed in Rwanda and Burundi has also fuelled outbreaks of violence in neighbouring Zaire where over 1 million refugees are camped.
A senior aid official said yesterday that 84 Tutsi women and children had taken refuge in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' compound at Uvira on Monday after more, than 30 people were killed in fighting last week between Tutsis and the Zairean army at Limera commune close to Luberizi refugee camp. Zairean authorities had jailed around 80 Tutsi men.