Citation
PARIS, April 9 (Reuter) - Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres
(MSF) said on Saturday it planned to send 33 tonnes of medical aid and
two teams of doctors to the Rwandan capital Kigali to care for dozens
of people in urgent need of surgery.
Anne Brown, a spokeswoman for the Paris branch of Belgian-based MSF,
said a plane carrying 26 tonnes of blood and surgical supplies would
fly on Sunday from Brussels or Amsterdam to the Burundi capital
Bujumbura, where they would pick up the surgeons.
A second plane with seven tonnes of aid hoped to leave Nairobi for
Kigali on Sunday morning, Brown said.
Both planes would have to wait until they received authorisation from
French troops controlling Kigali airport with Rwandan troops before
heading there, she said.
A MSF statement said several of its 40 medical experts in Kigali were
able to enter the city's hospital on Saturday. More than 50 people with
serious injuries would need emergency major surgery, it said.
The director of the Belgian branch of MSF said on Friday that several
dozen Rwandans working for international aid organisations in Kigali
had been massacred.
MSF director Georges Dallemagne said armed men, believed to be from
Rwanda's presidential guard, had shot the aid workers dead in front of
expatriate staff.
Brown said it was not known whether any of MSF's 126 volunteers in
Rwanda had been killed.
Two French humanitarian aid groups said on Friday they were evacuating
foreign workers from Rwanda because of massacres and chaos in the
central African country.
Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) and Pharmaciens Sans
Frontieres (Pharmacists Without Borders) said the decision had been
taken to protect the lives of their workers.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
