“Two Italian nuns were brutally murdered… the suspect is a young man who was seen leaving the scene,” said Damien Baseka, local government administrator of the Kamenge district in the capital Bujumbura.

Police said the two nuns, one aged 75, the other 83, were killed with a knife on Sunday afternoon. The killer then battered one nun with a rock.

The motive of the killing was not clear, and police said no money was taken.

Officers were hunting a man seen leaving the scene of the attack with a knife in his hand.

In 2011, a Croatian nun and an Italian charity worker were killed in an apparent botched robbery in northern Burundi.

The small nation in Africa’s Great Lakes region emerged in 2006 from 13 years of brutal civil war and its political climate remains fractious ahead of presidential polls due in June 2015.