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DRCONGO-UNREST LEAD
Ten dead in attack in eastern DR Congo’s Beni region
BENI, DR Congo, Feb 18, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – Ten people were killed in an
attack late Monday in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni, where a notorious
militia has killed hundreds since October, a local official and a military
officer said.
Hundreds of people were fleeing the area on Tuesday after the assault, by
foot, motorcycle and truck, an AFPTV reporter said.
“Eight civilians, an intelligence agent and a soldier” were killed in the
attack on the village of Manzahalo, local leader John Kambale told AFP on
Tuesday.
Ten houses were burned down.
The toll was confirmed by a military officer, who blamed the Allied
Democratic Forces (ADF) militia.
The ADF began as an Islamist-rooted rebel group in Uganda that opposed
President Yoweri Museveni.
It originally operated in Uganda but fell back to North Kivu, DR Congo’s
border province with Uganda, during the Congo Wars of the 1990s.
The militia appears to have halted raids inside Uganda and its recruits
today are of various nationalities.
Already blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths in Beni since 2014, the
group embarked on a series of massacres after the army launched a crackdown
in October.
The Congolese army says it has taken the ADF’s headquarters and that five
out of the group’s six senior commanders have been killed.
The UN peacekeeping mission MONUSCO last Wednesday reported that Congolese
troops had captured 40 ADF men.
Despite these reported successes, “the massacres have been continuing at a
frenzied rate in Beni,” according to the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), an NGO
that monitors human rights violations in eastern DR Congo.
A total of 393 people have died since the end of October, many of them
hacked to death, according to its toll.
It also says, quoting a source speaking on anonymity, that nearly 300
troops have been killed.
The ADF is one of numerous militias which plague the area — a legacy of
two wars that dragged the Democratic Republic of Congo’s neighbours into a
regional conflict.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1845 hrs