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BUJUMBURA, Dec 20 (AFP) - Several people were killed Tuesday in the Burundian capital in renewed clashes between rival ethnic Hutu and Tutsi youths, following Sunday's murder of about 10 people, witnesses said.
The youths killed several people suspected of starting Sunday's clashes, witnesses added.
The latest outbreak of violence took place in the central market area. There was no official casualty toll.
The market place, where at least five people were killed earlier this month in a grenade attack, was closed Tuesday morning. Public buildings and banks closed in the afternoon and public transport stopped running. Many people stayed at home.
Burundi President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya returned here Tuesday from a regional summit in Brazzaville, but offered no immediate comment.
Prime Minister Anatole Kanyenkiko, who for his part went to Musaga, a Tutsi-dominated part of town where much of the fighting took place Sunday evening, also remained silent.
Kanyenkiko was accompanied by special envoys from the United Nations and from the Organisation of African Unity.
Kanyenkiko's Union for National Progress Party has threatened to leave the government if Jean Minani, speaker of the National Assembly, and a Hutu member of the Front for Democracy in Burundi, remains in office.
The Tutsi-dominated Union for National Progress has accused Minani of having called on Hutus to kill Tutsis following the assassination of Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye in October 1993 by soldiers.
Some 50,000 people were killed in the wake of the failed coup.
Supporters of former interior minister Leonard Nyangoma, who broke away from the Front for Democracy in Burundi, are alleged to be behind Sunday's killings.
Nyangoma, who lives in exile in Zaire, is opposed to power sharing with the Union for National Progress and has set up his own party, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy, which also has a military wing.
Tutsi militias have also been formed in Burundi.
The country has the same ethnic mix as neighbouring Rwanda, where an estimated 500,000 to one million Tutsis died at the hands of hardline Hutu militias in a savage April-to-June civil war.
dn/fc/jms AFP AFP
