Pro-government militias have launched what witnesses described as a terrifying all-night assault on a university campus at the heart of attempts to unseat Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s embattled president.

Hundreds of student rebels have been occupying the Managua campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (Unan) since early May as part of a intensifying nationwide revolt against the former revolutionary hero that has now claimed more than 300 lives.



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But on Friday, after renewed anti-Ortega protests across the country, police and paramilitary troops moved in on the improvised barricades that students have erected around their tree-lined university.

“This massacre must stop!” Silvio José Baez, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, tweeted at dawn on Saturday after one student rebel, Gerald Vázquez, was reportedly shot in the head and died inside a small church at the south-eastern tip of the university’s grounds.

Much of the violence focused on the Divine Mercy church, a small place of worship near one of Unan’s main entrances where Catholic leaders said about 100 student rebels – some of them severely injured – took shelter after Friday night’s assault.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A demonstration in Managua, Nicaragua. ‘Our struggle is to eliminate this regime.’ Photograph: Jorge Torres/EPA

Throughout the night, students, clergy, medics and a handful of Nicaraguan and foreign journalists found themselves pinned down inside the church in the darkness, with shots ringing out close by.

“I need help to make this stop,” tweeted Erick Alvarado Cole, the local parish priest. “Protect us, my Lord,” he added in another message.



“It’s like they want to assassinate all the students,” another priest, Raul Zamora, told local radio, according to the Washington Post.



Earlier, students had livestreamed heart-wrenching farewell messages to their parents as they cowered behind the barricades and came under fire from paramilitary gangs known as “turbas”.



“Please help us,” one young woman pleads with viewers, before adding: “Mummy, forgive me, mummy. I was just trying to defend my homeland.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua. Photograph: Rodrigo Sura/EPA

With a Washington Post correspondent among those holed up in the church, politicians and diplomats in the United States condemned the attack.

“The Nicaraguan government must stop the massacre of students and civil society,” tweeted Carlos Trujillo, the US representative at the Organization of American States. “Those who are responsible for crimes against humanity will be held accountable.”

Francisco Palmieri, a senior state department official, condemned what he called the “para-police” attack on Unan. “This violence to intimidate and repress the people must cease immediately.”

The Republican senator Marco Rubio called the situation “rapidly and dangerously escalating” and urged Ortega, elected president in 2006, to call off his “thugs”. “If his violence leads to a bloodbath he will face consequences,” Rubio warned.

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The Unan campus had been occupied since 7 May and was one of three such protest camps set up in local universities since anti-government demonstrations erupted on 18 April.

During a recent tour of the Unan occupation, student rebels said they were determined to topple Nicaragua’s once revered Sandinista president, who helped overthrow Anastasio Somoza’s brutal dictatorship in 1979 but who they blamed for a wave of vicious repression that activists say has left more than 300 dead, including a number of babies and teenagers.



“Our struggle is to eliminate this regime,” said Armando Téllez, the first-year economics student in charge of the Unan camp. “The people have woken up – and there’s no way of putting them back to sleep.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest University students and anti-government protesters behind an entrance to the Autonomous University of Nicaragua. Photograph: Esteban Felix/AP

One masked chemistry dropout who was manning the wood and concrete barricades just outside the Divine Mercy church, said: “We’re defending democracy in our country ... I’m ready, physically and psychologically, for whatever disaster might come.”

In the early hours of Saturday, Partlow tweeted that he had been able to leave the church. But the assault appeared to go on, unabated. “For breakfast, they have given us a shower of bullets,” tweeted Ismael López, a Nicaraguan journalist who was still stuck inside.



Ninety minutes later López posted a photograph of what appeared to be a black body bag covering a corpse whose face had been covered with Nicaragua’s blue and white flag.

“Gerald was from Masaya, he was 20 and he was studying construction at Unan,” the accompanying message said.

