Awwal 04, 1432 H / April 08, 2011, SPA -- The top U.N. aid official said 40,000 people are seeking refuge in an Ivorian town that was the scene of mass killings last week. The International Red Cross said earlier this week that at least 800 people were killed in Duekoue, a town in the western part of the Ivory Coast. Valerie Amos, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, recently returned from the town and said she “saw evidence of what must have been terrible violence.” “People are immensely traumatized. They have witnessed terrible violence, and many have been directly targeted,” Amos told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York City. “Women told me stories of witnessing their husbands being executed,” Amos said. “Hundreds of children have been separated from their parents, and women and girls have allegedly been kidnapped.” "Around 40,000 people have found refuge … in Duekoue, which is being protected by U.N. peacekeepers,” Amos said. “Some of them walked 200 kilometers or more through the bush to reach relative safety there.” Amos described the people she met at the mission as “ordinary people who have fled some of the worst violence seen anywhere in recent years, and are now too afraid to leave the overcrowded compound, which I saw, where water and food are running out.” Post-election violence in the Ivory Coast has forced up to 1 million people to flee their homes and has claimed at least 462 lives, the United Nations said before the massacre at Duekoue.
