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Grenade attack, shootings disrupt Burundi elections

A grenade attack near a polling station killed at least one person and wounded another yesterday as Burundians voted in local elections seen as a key test of stability in this tiny central African nation struggling to emerge from 12 years of civil war.

The attack, coupled with sporadic shooting incidents in Bujumbura Rural province outside the capital and adjacent Bubanza province, appeared to be part of an effort to disrupt the polls there, a stronghold of the Burundi's lone remaining Hutu rebel group, officials said.

"It is clear there is someone who wants to disrupt elections in Bujumbura Rural and Bubanza," army spokesman Adolphe Maniarakiza said. "These are clearly shots meant to intimidate."

In Bubanza, officials said 14 polling stations had not opened as scheduled due to the shootings, which did not result in casualties.

"They are sporadic shootings intended to intimidate people from going to vote," said Edouard Nibigira, the commissioner of Burundi's internal security police. "It is not a question of a generalized violence."

Nibigira said the death and injury were caused by a grenade explosion near a polling station in the town of Muyira in Bujumbura Rural province where the rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) are still active.

The FNL, which signed a tentative truce with the government last month has pledged not to disrupt the vote unless attacked by the army but has been blamed for several raids since the ceasefire was agreed.

Neither the police nor the army could say who was responsible for the polling day violence.

The election of 3,225 municipal councillors, the first in a series of planned polls, marks the first time Burundians have elected their own leaders since the outbreak of the 1993 civil war between the Tutsi-dominated army and Hutu rebels that claimed some 300,000 lives.

It is the country's first exercise in democracy since the overwhelming approval in a February referendum of a power-sharing constitution, which all but the FNL has signed up to.
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