Gunmen in Rwanda Kill 17 Schoolgirls and a Nun

Gunmen opened fire on a group of schoolgirls in northwestern Rwanda, killing 17 girls and their headmistress, a Belgian nun, a Rwandan government spokesman said Tuesday.

A suspect was arrested after Monday’s attack and confessed to being a Hutu who had slipped into Rwanda from neighboring Zaire along with the other gunmen, said Wilson Rutayisire, director of the Rwandan government information office.

The slayings took place at a school in Gisenyi prefecture, which borders Zaire, after the girls refused the gunmen’s order to separate into groups of ethnic Hutus or Tutsis, the Rwandan News Agency said.

“The students refused to comply, and the killers then started shooting indiscriminately,” the agency quoted survivors as saying.

Seventeen girls were killed and 14 wounded, nine of them seriously, Rutayisire said by telephone from Kigali, the Rwandan capital. He said the school’s headmistress, Griet Bosmans, a 62-year-old Roman Catholic nun, bled to death.

In Brussels, a Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that the nun and a number of children were killed when armed men attacked early Monday.

The attack was the second on a school in little more than a month. On March 18, about 20 gunmen fired automatic weapons and threw grenades at schoolchildren in Kibuye prefecture, south of Gisenyi, killing a watchman and five pupils. Nineteen others were wounded in that attack, which also occurred after the children refused to separate into groups of Hutus and Tutsis.

About 85% of Rwanda’s 7 million people are Hutus, while 14% are Tutsis. An additional 1% are Twa.

Violence has grown in Rwanda since December, when more than 800,000 Hutu refugees returned from Zaire, where they had fled in 1994, fearing retaliation for the slaughter of more than 800,000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis.

Hundreds of Hutu militiamen who had been living among the refugees in Zaire were among the returnees.