Seventeen killed in grenade attack

A man killed himself and 16 other people with a grenade in northern Burundi when he was stopped from addressing scores of family members at a welcome home party for his sister, a police spokesman said today.

The man threw the grenade last night killing his sister and her husband, who were being honoured with the traditional ceremony in Muyinga district, 150 miles north of the capital, Bujumbura, said spokesman Pierre Channel Ntarabaganyi. Other family members also died.

The man who threw the grenade was not a policeman, soldier or former rebel, raising “the whole question of disarming the civilian population because it is difficult to tell when someone is carrying a grenade,” Ntarabaganyi told The Associated Press.

Burundi is just coming through a 13-year conflict that saw at least a quarter of a million people killed.

On Tuesday, rival factions of the National Liberation Force clashed in Bujumbura killing 25 rebel combatants and one civilian in the worst fighting in the capital in four years. The fighting took place after months of simmering tension over leadership of the group.

Burundi’s conflict started in October 1993, when paratroopers from the Tutsi ethnic minority – which had long dominated politics and the military - assassinated the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu majority.

All of Burundi’s main rebel groups from the majority Hutus have signed peace deals, leading to democratic elections in 2005 that established President Pierre Nkurunziza’s administration. Only the National Liberation Force, a Hutu group, held out on the earlier peace agreements.