U.N. Agents Gather Evidence Of Rwanda Massacres Relatives Sort Through Piles Of Clothes For Traces Of Dead

Albertine Mukakamanzi picked her way through rotting, blood-drenched clothing laid out in the churchyard, one of many people searching Saturday for traces of missing loved ones.

In piles with bracelets, a prosthetic leg and a Winnie-the-Pooh baby suit, she found her uncle’s religious vestments. Father Senyenzi, the priest at Urusengero Roman Catholic church, was massacred along with perhaps 800 Tutsis when the extremist Hutu militia attacked the church in 1994.

Survivors said he was thrown from the three-story bell tower of his picturesque church that overlooks a sapphire lake.

“I was hiding when he was buried,” said Mukakamanzi, who fled and hid after hearing the church massacre from her shelter in a nearby stadium.

U.N. investigators also worked near the church Saturday, collecting evidence from a mass grave where about 500 bodies, mostly women and children, have been unearthed. They hope friends and relatives will recognize personal belongings and be able to identify the dead.

Victims’ remains are piled inside the church where forensic scientists have spent three weeks collecting evidence for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The international team has determined smaller graves scattered near the church contain remains of perhaps 200 to 300 more people.

Half a million people were massacred from April to July 1994 in Rwanda’s ethnic violence. Most of the victims were members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, but Hutus from the majority who opposed extremism and the government also were cut down.

In the aftermath, a Tutsi-controlled government came to power, and some 1.7 million Hutus fled, most to refugee camps in neighboring Zaire, Burundi and Tanzania.

Also in the camps are some of the people believed to have masterminded the killings, people the tribunal hopes to bring to justice later this year.

“The kind of evidence we are collecting will disallow this revisionist idea that there was no genocide, that it was a war,” said Dr. William Haglund, a forensic scientist for the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights and leader of the exhumation.

“If this was a war, then the infants were vicious infants. This wasn’t a war.”

Most of the dead were killed with blunt instruments or machetes and few appeared to have offered resistance, investigators said. About 45 percent of the dead were under age 18 and most were women and girls.

The tribunal has indicted eight people for the killings in Kibuye, where Rwandan officials say 90 percent of the Tutsi population was exterminated. The Tanzania-based court is withholding their names until they are captured.

Trials cannot begin until the suspects are arrested. Prosecutors hope this will happen in the next few months.