Piles and piles of bodies in S. Sudan slaughter

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Gunmen in South Sudan who targeted civilians including children and the elderly left "piles and piles" of bodies, many of them in a mosque and a hospital, the U.N.'s top humanitarian official in the country said today.

Toby Lanzer told The Associated Press in a phone interview today that the ethnically targeted killings in a provincial capital are "quite possibly a game-changer" for a conflict that has been raging since mid-December and that has exposed longstanding ethnic hostilities.

There was also a disturbing echo of Rwanda, which is marking the 20th anniversary this month of its genocide that killed an estimated 1 million people. The Rwandan genocide saw kill orders broadcast by radio and it happened in South Sudan, Lanzer said.

"It's the first time we're aware of that a local radio station was broadcasting hate messages encouraging people to engage in atrocities," said Lanzer, who was in Bentiu on Sunday and Monday. "And that really accelerates South Sudan's descent into an even more difficult situation from which it needs to extract itself."

U.N. human rights investigators said late Monday that hundreds of civilians were killed last week because of their ethnicity after rebel forces seized Bentiu, the capital of oil-producing Unity state. Those rebel forces are Nuer, the same ethnic group that former Vice President Riek Machar, who is now a rebel leader, comes from.