UGANDAN rebels, believed to be Christian fundamentalists, slaughtered 91 Sudanese refugees in separate attacks last week, UN relief workers said yesterday.
The rebels injured at least 20 refugees and abducted four in the attacks on Acholpii camp in northern Uganda on Friday night and Saturday night, they said.
"Initial reports are indicating that this is the work of the Lord's Resistance Army," Ms Michele Quintaglie, spokeswoman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Nairobi, said.
The Sudan-based LRA rebels seek to rule Uganda on the Biblical lines of the Ten Commandments.
Ms Millicent Mutuli, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Nairobi, said the attacks were the worst so far on refugee camps in northern Uganda.
"Information we have indicates that 91 were killed, 20 injured and four others abducted," Ms Mutuli said, adding that the attackers burned houses, vehicles and looted food.
UNHCR officials blamed unidentified "rebels", declining to accuse the LRA. But they agreed the LRA were the only rebels known to be operating in the area in Kigum district.
Ms Mutuli said more details on the attack would emerge after a UNHCR team from Kampala returned from the camp.
A spokeswoman at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, Ms Christiane Berthiaume, said the camp was first attacked on Friday when huts and a medical centre were burned and two Ugandan policemen and their families abducted.
She said about 150 unidentified attackers returned on Saturday, opening fire on people in the camp.
They were later driven away by the Ugandan army, which said the LRA rebels recently crossed in their hundreds from their bases in southern Sudan.
An aid official contacted in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, by telephone said the camp was home to 16,000 Sudanese refugees who fled the war between southern rebels and Khartoum's Islamist backed government.
"This was a slaughter of innocent refugees. It is an indefensible action," said the official, who declined to be identified.
The UNHCR says there are some 210,000 Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda.
Uganda accuses Sudan of supporting and aiding the LRA, a charge Khartoum denies.
Khartoum accuses Uganda of backing southern rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
Military sources in Uganda said fighting raged on Sunday in Kitgum between the LRA rebels and government troops after nine men from the two sides were killed in weekend clashes.
Three soldiers and six rebels were killed on Saturday at Latany, 60 km south of the Sudan border, and fighting continued on Sunday, military sources in the area said.
The LRA, led by former Catholic preacher Mr Joseph Kony, has fought President Yoweri Museveni's government since 1987.
They have recently stepped up attacks on villages, army positions and military escorted convoys in north Uganda.
Ms Quintaglie said insecurity had increased in northern Uganda to an extent where it had become almost impossible to get food aid into the area "even with heavily escorted convoys".
The rebellion has disrupted life in much of northern Uganda where about five million people live, though Kitgum district had escaped the recent raids.
The army has stepped up operations in the region, deploying about 12,000 troops to try to smoke the rebels out of their hiding places.