Nun murdered in Burundi convent attack

BUJUMBURA (AFP) - Gunmen in Burundi murdered a Croatian nun and an Italian charity worker in an apparent botched robbery and kidnapping condemned Monday by the Vatican as a "grave act of violence".

Sister Luckrecija Mamic was killed immediately after the gunmen burst into the Italian religious mission northeast of the capital Bujumbura late on Sunday.

The gunmen took money from the Ancelle della Carita mission before kidnapping medical charity volunteer Francesco Bazzani and Italian nun, Sister Carla Brianza, a local Catholic missionary said.

Bazzani was later shot dead while the nun fought off her attackers and escaped with relatively minor wounds.

The injured nun has been operated on but her condition "is not worrying," the Italian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Police announced Monday that two men, aged 20 and 24, had been arrested for the attack after a shootout, and said that the motive was most probably robbery.

There has been a wave of attacks in Burundi in recent months that are officially blamed on "armed bandits". The popular view is that these attacks are part of a nascent rebellion that is gathering pace.

"Two armed men went into the Ancelle della Carita welfare house, to which the two nuns belonged, with the aim of robbing them, and they killed the Croatian nun straight away," said Father Michel Tognazzi, a Catholic missionary in nearby Kiremba.

Tognazzi said they then stole a car and fled, taking Bazzani and Brianza hostage. The gunmen stopped after around eight kilometres and made the pair get out of the car before shooting Bazzani at point blank range.

But despite the brutal murder of her colleague in front of her, Brianza fought back against the attackers.

"Carla managed to grab the gun, which helped save her life" and the attacker stabbed her in the hand before fleeing with his accomplice, the priest added.

Tognazzi told the Misna missionary news agency that Croatian nun Sister Lukrecija had lived in Burundi for 10 years after spending two decades in Ecuador.

Bazzani worked for a medical charity based near Verona in northern Italy and was administrator of a hospital next door to the convent, in Ngozi, around 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Bujumbura, near the border with Rwanda.

He is believed to have walked to the convent believing there had been a power failure, without realising the electricty had been cut by the attackers.

"The culprits of the double murder were arrested around 1:00 pm (1100 GMT), they are aged 20 and 24 years and we are sure that they are the two killers," said police spokesman Major Pierre Chanel Ntarabaganyi.

"We are sure that they are the perpetrators of this heinous crime," said Claude Nahayo, the governor of Ngozi province.

"They had with them 4,000 euros stolen from the monastery, and one of them had been wounded in the leg during a shootout with police that night."

Nahayo added that an investigation had been launched "to determine the circumstances of the attack, but we are sure that it is simple banditry."

The attack was first announced by the Italian foreign ministry in Rome.

Such attacks have raised fears of a resumption of large-scale hostilities in a country still reeling from a civil war that killed 300,000 people between 1993 and 2006.