500 Bodies Found in Rwandan Grave

UNITED NATIONS —  Nearly 500 bodies, mostly women and children who were hacked or bludgeoned to death, have been found in a mass grave near a Rwandan church where thousands were believed massacred in 1994, a U.S. forensic expert said Friday.

Dr. Robert H. Kirschner said the wounds on the victims indicated that few offered resistance.

“Almost all were killed by blunt trauma blows to the head or by machete blows,” he said in a telephone interview from Chicago. “More than half the victims were children, and two-thirds to three-quarters were women or children. So the idea that this was the result of some sort of combat doesn’t hold any water.”

But Kirschner, director of the international forensic program of the group Physicians for Human Rights, cast doubt on early reports that up to 4,000 people had been slaughtered after taking refuge in the local church in Kibuye. He said the largest grave contained about 500 bodies and that perhaps 200 to 300 more were still buried in smaller sites scattered around the church.

The area was home to a large population of ethnic Tutsis before the 1994 genocide campaign by Hutu extremists that killed an estimated 500,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsis.