Rwanda genocide anniversary: Harrowing pictures of Nyamata church massacre

Twenty-three years ago, Rwanda witnessed what later became known as the "world's fastest genocide". At least 800,000 people – mainly Tutsi and moderate Hutu – were killed in 100 days.

Massacres began after a plane that carried the then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down near Kigali International Airport, in April 1994.

In the aftermath of the fatal plane crash, people from the Hutu ethnic group, armed with machetes, guns and grenades, stormed the house of every Tutsi family whose names featured on lists prepared months before the genocide. Rwandan Tutsi – along with Hutu who refused to take part in the massacres– fled their homes and sheltered in stadiums schools and churches.

Given Rwanda's Hutu-Tutsi antagonism sparked during colonial era, ethnic killings had already occurred in the country. In some occasions, civilians had survived after taking shelter in sacred buildings.

However, 1994 was a different story. As the genocide erupted in the country, at least 10,000 people took shelter in a red-brick church in the town of Nyamata, a 20-minute ride from the capital Kigali, only to be massacred with guns, machetes and grenades a few days later.

Once the place where Christians from all nearby hills gathered for the Sunday mass, the Nyamata church is today the symbol of the ferocity that ravaged the country in 1994.

Clothes and belongings of those slaughtered are kept in the church to remind everyone of the atrocities. On the lower ground of the building wooden shelves store thousands of skulls and bones of the victims.