Attack on village leaves 17 dead

Rwandan rebels attacked villagers in neighboring eastern Congo with machetes, spears and hammers on Sunday, killing 17, wounding 28 and taking up to a dozen hostages, a local rights worker said, citing survivors’ accounts.

The attackers, who are based in Congo, descended on the village of Kanyola in the middle of the night, rights worker Constantin Charondagwa said by telephone from Bukavu, about 30 miles from the village.

The motive for the reported attack was not immediately clear.

Rwandan rebels based in eastern Congo include members of Rwanda’s former army and extremist Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, who led the 100-day genocide of more than a half-million people in Rwanda in 1994.

One key rebel group, the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda, includes people accused of participating in the genocide, which targeted members of the Tutsi ethnic minority and political moderates from the Hutu majority.

GUATEMALA CITY

Shootings kill candidate, activist

Two attacks by gunmen killed the mayoral candidate from a leftist Guatemalan political party and an activist handing out leaflets for a conservative party, official said Sunday.

Political tensions are rising in Guatemala in the run-up to elections in September, but party officials said they did not know who was behind the weekend killings.

Liberaldo Granados, a candidate backed by the leftist party of Indian Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, was shot dead late Saturday in front of his home in the town of Zacapa, said Nineth Montenegro, secretary-general for the Encounter For Guatemala Party.

“We are starting an election season with a lot of violence,” Montenegro said.

On Sunday, an activist with the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt was gunned down in the town of Escuintla, said the party’s secretary-general, Aristides Crespo. He did not release the victim’s name.

CANNES, France

Film on abortion wins at Cannes

A harrowing film about illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania beat 21 movies by well-known directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Wong Kar-wai to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday.

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s low-budget film, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” depicts the horrors a student endures to ensure her friend can have a secret abortion.

Mungiu, who was awarded the Palme d’Or by actress Jane Fonda, said he didn’t have enough money to shoot the film six months ago. He hoped the win would inspire other “small filmmakers from small countries.”

Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s “Mogari No Mori” (“The Mourning Forest”) took the festival’s grand prize, the second-highest award, in a surprise. The film is about two people struggling to overcome the deaths of loved ones.