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Attack kills 15 in eastern DR Congo
OICHA, DR Congo, Jan 29, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Fifteen people have been killed
in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni, where hundreds have died in militia
violence since November, a local official said Wednesday, giving a
provisional toll.
In the past 24 hours, “14 bodies have been found hacked to death,” while a
pastor was killed in a separate attack, the administrator for the Beni
region, Donat Kibwana, told AFP.
Two people with severe head wounds have been admitted to the hospital in
Oicha for surgery, an AFP reporter there said.
According to a toll compiled by civil society groups, 265 people have been
killed in the Beni region since the army began a crackdown on an armed group,
the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), on October 30.
The massacres seem to be a tactic by the ADF to frighten the population
into silence, say local commentators.
The ADF began as an Islamist rebel group in Uganda that opposed Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni.
It fell back into eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 during the
Congo Wars and appears to have halted raids inside Uganda. Its recruits today
are people of various nationalities.
BSS/AFP/BZC/2100HRS