8 TOURISTS SLAUGHTERED IN UGANDA.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

Rwandan rebels kidnapped and slaughtered eight foreign tourists, including two Americans, turning their gorilla-watching expedition into a forced march of terror and death deep in a rain forest, survivors and witnesses said Tuesday.

The dead also included four Britons and two New Zealanders, according to diplomats. At least a half-dozen other tourists survived the nightmarish rampage, which began with rebels systematically raiding campgrounds at a national park, killing rangers and rounding up foreigners.

``The rebels were looking for Americans and British,'' said Hussein Kivumbi, manager of one of five tented camps at the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and a survivor of the attack. ``They killed four women and four men with knives, machetes and axes.''

Some of the victims were killed because they couldn't walk fast enough, he said. At least one woman victim appeared to have been sexually assaulted.

Americans Rob Haubner, 48, and his wife, Susan Miller, 42, who worked for the computer company, Intel Corp., were slain, company spokesman Bill Calder confirmed. The Hillsboro, Ore., couple was on their third trip to Africa with another couple from the company. The State Department confirmed their deaths.

All of the victims were brutally hacked to death Monday in the jungles of southwestern Uganda made famous in the film ``Gorillas in the Mist.''

Six tourists were rescued and were then flown Tuesday to safety in Kampala, Uganda's capital.

Events at the camps on the edge of Bwindi National Park unfolded rapidly, though the exact time it began was not immediately clear.

The rebels burst into the camp with a blast of grenades and automatic weapons fire. The Ugandans - a game warden and three park rangers - were killed in the initial assault. The rebels looted the buildings, setting a few on fire and torching the vehicles they came across as well.

Survivors said that initially the rebels herded 31 tourists into the Abercrombie and Kent encampment and began stripping them of their valuables.

``Suddenly some soldiers came in the tent and they asked for money, for jewelry, for watches,'' said Anne Peltier, the French deputy ambassador to Uganda, who was among the survivors.

At first the rebels seemed to be treating the tourists well, but some of those captured had a foreboding of what was to come by the treatment of one group of British tourists.

Linda Adams, 54, from California, was among the 15 hostages rounded up and sent into the jungle with the troops about 40 minutes after the first attack. She had already seen that the British man sitting next to her had purple toenails from where he had been beaten on the feet.

``The British people were being forced to walk barefoot if they had no shoes,'' said Adams, who feigned an asthma attack and waved her inhaler as the march got under way. The soldiers let her walk back into the camp.

Rita Studd, the mother of Susan Studd, a 46-year-old Oregon woman who survived the attack, said she talked to her daughter in Kampala on Tuesday.

She said her daughter and her daughter's husband, Robert McLaurin, 44, were awakened in their tent in the Abercrombie and Kent encampment by grenade explosions and gunfire.

``They heard a woman scream, so they got out the back of their tent and went into the bush and hid there,'' said Studd. ``It was just a miracle.''

Another American, Elizabeth Garland, 29, a Fulbright scholar from the University of Chicago, told her father that she had escaped by hiding in her tent. Her father, James Garland, the president of Miami University in Ohio, told The Associated Press that his daughter, too, had been awakened by gunfire.

Another survivor, Mark Ross, a tour operator and pilot from Arkansas, was freed with a political message from the rebels. He said he came upon the remains of some captives who had been marched through the rain forest.

``We came across the first set of bodies,'' he said. ``The women that we'd been told would be escorted back had been killed on the spot. It looks like one was raped prior to being killed.''

Ross said he saw five bodies, and ``the ones that I saw had their heads crushed in and deep slashes.''

The rebels also gave a message to Deputy Ambassador Peltier blaming the Americans and British for not backing ``the ethnic Hutu majority.''

The rebels attached notes to the corpses: ``Americans and British, we don't want you on our land. You support our enemy.''

Western governments had already warned tourists against traveling through much of western Uganda because of rebel and bandit activity near the border with Congo. Until now, however, the Bwindi gorilla reserve had been considered safe.

The attack struck a blow at Uganda, itself on the mend after years of chaos. The rebels were among the Hutu fighters who fled Rwanda after killing more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in the 1994 genocide there. They accuse Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni of aiding their enemies, by supporting the Tutsis based in Uganda who invaded to stop the genocide.

The rebels, estimated to number about 40,000, have been carrying out cross-border raids from bases in eastern Congo, often ambushing vehicles and kidnapping or killing the passengers in Uganda and Rwanda.

The Ugandan government said in a statement that it ``strongly condemns this barbaric act''

Embassy spokesman James Okanya said the U.S. government sent an aircraft to pick up the survivors and bring the bodies of those killed to Entebbe Airport outside the capital.

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PHOTO (color) American citizen Mark Ross shows four fingers to signify four women tourists killed at a U.S. government office in Kampala, Uganda.

Jean-Marc Bouju/Associated Press