LIBERIAN CAPTIVES' CAMP SHELLED; REFUGEES FLEE TO U.S. EMBASSY.

Byline: Howard W. French The New York Times

Several thousand Liberians, being held hostage in a barracks here by one of the country's warring militias, came under mortar attack Friday by another faction for the second day.

While the fighting continued, a U.S. evacuation effort focused on pulling out stranded Americans and other foreigners from isolated hiding places here.

Diplomats said they had no way of verifying the number of people trapped in the camp. At the U.S. embassy a mile and a half away, loud thuds from the shelling could be heard through the day Thursday and again Friday.

The attacks occurred late Friday morning at the Barklay Training Center, a sprawling camp near the center of town that belonged to the former Liberian army.

Forces of the former rebel leader, Charles Taylor, lobbed mortar shells into the compound, killing several people and wounding many others.

Moussa Ismael, 46, a Lebanese merchant who was rescued from the camp but had to leave his wife and three children behind in captivity, said: ``It is better for me to die with my children. I don't care about my money or my property, but please, God, spare their lives.''

In an interview with the BBC, Taylor denied that he had bombed the Barklay Center, but said his men were determined to capture it.

``This is a responsible government, and everything will be done to allow humanitarian agencies to do their work,'' said Taylor, who is now a deputy chairman of the bitterly split Council of State.

His words provoked hisses from a large crowd of refugees gathered around a shortwave radio at the base of the West African peacekeeping force.

Refugees who escaped from the camp said hostages had been pulled into the training center by fighters of the Krahn ethnic group who are loyal to D. Roosevelt Johnson, a renegade government minister.

Liberia's 7-year-old civil war exploded anew last week after Taylor and other Council of State members stepped up efforts to arrest Johnson on murder charges.

The fighting that ensued has pitted thousands of ethnic Krahn combatants against the combined forces of Al Haji G.V. Kromah and Taylor, whose 1989 invasion of Liberia from the neighboring Ivory Coast set off a war that killed well over 150,000.

Neither the local nor international authorities have estimated casualty figures from the seven days of ferocious urban combat.

U.N. officials were forced out of their compound in the Mamba Point area of the capital Friday and were marched by Taylor's fighters to the U.S. embassy, where they joined hundreds of others.

Paul Koulen, deputy director of the U.N. development program here, said that in just the short walk to the embassy, he had seen numerous bodies strewn in the streets, some of them with their hands tied behind their backs.

From the air, smoldering fires could be seen above the city and long lines of people wandered the streets in search of food and water.

While U.S. Air Force gunners scanned the ground below, shots were fired in the vicinity of a U.S. military helicopter that ferried in a small number of foreign journalists from neighboring Sierra Leone, forcing a hasty takeoff.

The U.S. ambassador to Liberia, William Milam, said more than 1,000 people, mostly foreigners, have been evacuated from the country in recent days, and that more were turning up all the time.