Survivors of an attack on a camp in north-western Rwanda in which 271 people were killed said Hutu rebels came at night and started chopping up their victims.
The ethnic Tutsi refugees from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) were killed at Mudende camp, about 120 km north-west of Kigali, when it was attacked on Wednesday night by Hutu militiamen armed with rifles, grenades and machetes, according to a senior army official.
A total of 271 people were killed in the attack and 227 were wounded, Col Nyamwasa Kayumba said.
Yesterday morning survivors were burying the dead - mostly women and children and most bearing horrific wounds - just yards from the tents in which they were slaughtered.
One survivor, whose son was hacked to death, said: "They came very quietly while we were sleeping and we had no chance to escape. They just started chopping, chopping, chopping."
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Mr Sadako Ogata, strongly condemned the attack yesterday and a spokeswoman called the attackers merciless.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, said in the Congo yesterday that she was asking the US war crimes envoy, Mr David Scheffer, to go to Rwanda to assist in the investigation of the massacre.
Ms Albright, the most senior US official to visit Rwanda since the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis in 1994, has condemned a recent upsurge of violence in the country connected to the return from Congo of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees. The Hutus fled their country in 1994 fearing reprisals for the genocide.
Survivors of Wednesday's attack said the camp, nestling in hills just 8 km from the border of the former Zaire, was attacked on two fronts beginning just before midnight. Earlier, an army spokesman said there were around 1,000 attackers, but survivors said there were only around 120. They said the attack went on for about five hours. The insurgents kidnapped some 50 camp residents to use as protection as they fled back towards the Congo, survivors said.
Col Kayumba yesterday called on the international community to acknowledge the Hutu insurgency in the north-west of Rwanda as genocide rather than war.
The 70 Rwandan soldiers guarding the camp were unable to do much at first because of confusion in the two-pronged attack, according to the colonel. But he said they were soon supported by a company of around 120 men from a nearby garrison.
Mudende's residents had fled the former Zaire after hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus arrived in the area. "The people in the camp are not Rwandans," Col Kayumba said. "They were chased out of Congo because they were Tutsis. They were killed here because they were Tutsis."
The bodies of three women were still lying in the corner of a tractor shed where they had fled to escape the carnage. They had been hacked with machetes, with limbs almost severed and fingers missing - suggesting they had tried to protect their heads.
The camp, set in the grounds of an abandoned university, was home to around 6,000 Tutsis from Masisi, about 60 km across the border.
It was the second attack on Mudende since the killing of 148 people, mostly ethnic Tutsi refugees from the former Zaire, by suspected Hutu rebel gangs in August.
AFP adds: President Laurent Kabila of the Congo yesterday called for an international inquiry into the massacre. Speaking at a joint press conference in Kinshasa with Ms Albright, Mr Kabila said "at least 800 refugees" were killed on Wednesday night at the camp at Mudende. A teacher there said he estimated that between 700 and 900 people may have been massacred.
Mr Kabila blamed the killings on the Hutu Interahamwe militia and said: "I've heard no international protest" over the massacre while demanding a "commission of investigation" into it.
"Here, when you kill a killer, an Interahamwe, the international community sets up an investigation," he complained, referring to the UN inquiry that has just begun in the Congo into allegations that Mr Kabila's rebels committed massacres during his successful revolt against the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Mr Kabila also mentioned that he was unaware of protests that had prevented the UN investigators from working on Thursday near the north-western city of Mbandaka and would inform himself. He insisted that the UN team was "free to work" - after a series of delays and obstacles to the inquiry lasting several months.
Meanwhile, Rwanda's national radio said yesterday that the country's mainly Tutsi army killed 40 Hutu rebels in fighting in the south-west.
The rebels, who were killed on Thursday, were among a group of some 500 Interahamwe militiamen and Hutu soldiers of Rwanda's former army who had crossed into Rwanda across the Rusizi river from the Congo, according to the radio.
The report said that five soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army were injured and it reported that government troops had surrounded the rebels in forested, mountainous areas.