Contact re-established with refugees in Guinea

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says it has re-established contact with a significant proportion of four-hundred-thousand missing refugees in southern Guinea.

They'd disappeared ten days ago following attacks by insurgents near the country's southern border.

The agency representative in Guinea, Chris Ache, said more than eighty thousand refugees had been found north of the Guinean market town of Gueckedou -- and he said he had information that more than two-hundred thousand others were in the same region.

Mr Ache said relief was being sent by road and air to the displaced refugees -- who are largely from Sierra Leone and Liberia. Conakry accuses President Charles Taylor's Liberia of being behind the recent attacks across its border.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service