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KIGALI, May 19 (AFP) - A top Rwandan opposition party official, Emmanuel Gapyisi, was assassinated overnight Tuesday outside his home, informed sources said here Wednesday.
Gapyisi, head of the political bureau of the Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), had just joined a club called the Forum for Peace and Democracy, which has shown strong opposition to an offensive led since October 1990 by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).
No claim of responsibility for the murder had been made early Wednesday and the motive was unclear. The MDR, led by Faustin Twagiramungu, is the small central African highland nation's main opposition party.
Some sources said Gapyisi might have been killed by the Tutsi-majority FPR for his membership of the Forum, but others believed hardliners in the Hutu regime could have been responsible.
The Forum has also been criticised in opposition circles which accuse it of promoting the views of the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic, a party that claims to defend the interests of the Hutu majority, who have run Rwanda since bloody massacres of Tutsis in 1959.
A former secretary-general of the ministry of public works in the 1980s, Gapyisi has also held posts in international organisations, notably the U.N. Development Programme and Shelter-Afrique, an institution associated with the African Development Bank.
mgu-jpc/nb AFP AFP SEQN-0133
