Rebels Kill 8 Tourists in Uganda
By DIANNA CAHN Associated Press Writer
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) - Rwandan rebels kidnapped and slaughtered
eight foreign tourists, including two Americans, turning their gorilla-watching
expedition into a forced march of terror and death deep in a rain forest,
survivors and witnesses said Tuesday.
The dead also included four Britons and two New Zealanders, according to
diplomats. At least a half dozen other tourists survived the nightmarish rampage, which began with
rebels systematically raiding campgrounds at a national park, killing rangers and rounding up foreigners.
''The rebels were looking for Americans and British,'' said Hussein Kivumbi, manager of one of five
tented camps at the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and a survivor of the attack. ''They killed four women
and four men with knives, machetes and axes.''
Some of the victims were killed because they couldn't walk fast enough, he said. At least one women
victim appeared to have been sexually assaulted.
Americans Rob Haubner, 48, and his wife, Susan Miller, 42, who worked for the computer company,
Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), were slain, company spokesman Bill Calder confirmed. The Hillsboro,
Ore., couple was on their third trip to Africa with another couple from the company. The State
Department confirmed their deaths.
All of the victims were brutally hacked to death Monday in the jungles of southwestern Uganda made
famous in the film ''Gorillas in the Mist.''
Six tourists were rescued and were then flown Tuesday to safety in Kampala, Uganda's capital.
Events at the camps on the edge of Bwindi National Park unfolded rapidly, though the exact time it
began was not immediately clear.
About 200 Rwandan rebels charged into the camps set along the mountainous border with Congo and
separated the tourists in search of Americans and British, Kivumbi said.
A French diplomat was let go, Kivumbi said. The rebels, speaking Kinyarwanda and French and dressed
in ragtag clothes, then forced hostages into the mountains of neighboring Congo.
Three Americans, six Britons, three New Zealanders, an Australian, a Swiss woman and a Canadian
were among those kidnapped, Ugandan officials said, adding that three tourists were still missing.
''They wanted them to move fast, but some couldn't,'' Kivumbi said. ''So they killed with machetes one
man and one woman who couldn't walk. Then they killed another three.''
''There was no rescue,'' he said.
Uganda's army said it attempted to pursue them, but the rebels ran too fast.
One survivor, Mark Ross, a tour operator and pilot from Arkansas, was freed with a political message
from the rebels. He said he came upon the remains of some captives who had been marched through
the rain forest.
''We came across the first set of bodies,'' he said. ''The women that we'd been told would be escorted
back had been killed on the spot. It looks like one was raped prior to being killed.''
Ross said he saw five bodies, and ''the ones that I saw had their heads crushed in and deep slashes.''
His account clashed with that of Ugandan police spokesman Eric Naigambi, who said the tourists were
killed in a gunbattle between the rebels and Ugandan soldiers during a rescue operation Tuesday
morning.
Despite the police accounts, U.S. officials said Tuesday that evidence favored numerous witness
accounts that the eight were slain by the rebels.
The rebels also gave a message to Anne Peltier - a survivor who is France's deputy ambassador to
Uganda - blaming the Americans and British for not backing ''the ethnic Hutu majority.''
The rebels attached notes to the corpses: ''Americans and British, we don't want you on our land. You
support our enemy.''
The rebels were among the Hutu fighters who fled Rwanda after killing more than 500,000 minority
Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in the 1994 genocide there. They accuse Uganda's President
Yoweri Museveni of aiding their enemies, by supporting the Tutsis based in Uganda who invaded to stop
the genocide.
The rebels, estimated to number about 40,000, have been carrying out cross-border raids from bases in
eastern Congo, often ambushing vehicles and kidnapping or killing the passengers in both Uganda and
Rwanda.
The Ugandan government said in a statement that it ''strongly condemns this barbaric act''
Uganda said four Ugandans - a game warden and three park rangers - were killed when the rebels first
raided two tourist camps. It said its soldiers killed four in a jungle pursuit that continued Tuesday.
Fighting between Rwandan Hutu rebels and the Uganda People's Defense Forces continued Tuesday
along the forested border in this east African country of 17 million people.
Embassy spokesman James Okanya said the U.S. government sent an aircraft to pick up the survivors
and bring the bodies of those killed to Entebbe Airport outside the capital.
The tourists were abducted at campgrounds on the edge of Bwindi National Park, known as the
Impenetrable Forest, the starting point for visitors hoping to glimpse the 320 mountain gorillas that
remain along the border mountain's slopes.
The 1988 film ''Gorillas in the Mist'' about researcher Dian Fossey was based on her book of the same
name, which dealt with a woman who risked her life in Rwanda trying to save the gorillas from
extinction.
In August, the rebels kidnapped four foreign tourists and seven Congolese guides and porters on a trek
to observe the gorillas. They later released a Canadian tourist and all the Congolese escorts.
The three other tourists - two Swedes and one New Zealander - have not been heard from since.
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