Former Burundian minister killed in car ambush

BUJUMBURA, Burundi (Reuters) -- Ethnic Hutu rebels killed a former Burundian minister, his son and a woman in an ambush on his car, army officials said on Saturday.

Colonel Stanislas Mandi was driving along the country's main road some 20 km (13 miles) east of the capital Bujumbura when his car came under fire. The two other dead were passengers in his car.

"The ambush happened on Friday around 4:00 p.m. (1400 GMT), army spokesman colonel Longin Minani told Reuters.

"The rebels started shooting at the cars that were passing both ways near the Mageyo village."

Four other vehicles were hit by bullets but there were no other casualties, Minani said.

Rebels from Burundi's Hutu majority have been fighting the Tutsi-led army for seven years in a civil war that has cost the lives of 200,000 people -- most of them civilians.

The conflict began when Tutsi troops murdered the country's first democratically-elected president, a Hutu, but is simply the latest phase in a long and violent power struggle between the two ethnic groups.

Mandi, a Tutsi, most recently worked at the Commercial Bank of Burundi, but served as interior minister in the former government of President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza who seized power in 1976.

He was responsible for the redistribution of land that had belonged to the tens of thousands of Hutus who fled Burundi in 1972 after the army brutally suppressed a Hutu uprising.

A peace agreement between the government and opposition political parties was signed in August under the mediation of former South African President Nelson Mandela. But Mandela has so far failed to persuade rebels to agree to a ceasefire.

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