The Roman Catholic charity Caritas says more than 1,000 people were massacred in a western Ivory Coast town.
The U.N. mission in Ivory Coast says it has nearly 1,000 peacekeepers in Duekoue but no information of mass killings.
Spokesman Patrick Nicholson told The Associated Press that Caritas workers visited the town of Duekoue on Wednesday. He says one neighbourhood was filled with bodies of victims killed by gunshots and hacked to death with machetes.
He says the workers “estimate over 1,000 killed.”
The International Federation of the Red Cross said more than 800 were killed there in “inter-communal violence,” apparently on Tuesday. The town had been seized a day earlier by rebels moving south in a bid to oust the entrenched incumbent leader.
