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From: [log in to unmask] 
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Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2003 2:46 AM
Subject: U.N. says discovers new massacre in Congo


U.N. says discovers new massacre in Congo

By Dino Mahtani

KINSHASA (Reuters) - U.N. military observers have discovered 16 bodies, mainly women and children, in a village in eastern Congo, victims of what appeared to be the latest in a series of massacres, U.N. officials said Friday.

A statement from the U.N. mission in Congo said the victims had been hacked to death with axes, machetes, clubs and knives.

Two survivors of the attack, which took place Monday in the village of Ndunda had been hospitalized and four more people were missing, the statement said.

Ndunda lies 20 miles north of Uvira, the main town in Congo's troubled South Kivu province, on the border with Burundi.

The United Nations quoted witnesses as saying the attackers belonged to Burundi's biggest rebel group fighting in Congo, the Hutu Forces for the Defense of Democracy, or FDD.

The witnesses say the attackers, who numbered around 20, spoke Kirundi -- Burundi's language -- and some of them were dressed in Burundian uniforms.

"We discovered 16 dead bodies, mainly women and children on Wednesday. The FDD are suspected and there are investigations underway," a U.N. official told Reuters by telephone from Uvira.

The U.N. statement said members of another Burundian Hutu rebel group, the extremist Forces for National Liberation, or FNL, were also present in the area.

Earlier this week, U.N. troops deployed some 375 miles to the north in the Ituri province had already found the bodies of 40 children and 25 adults killed Monday in a separate attack blamed on Congolese tribal militiamen.

Massacres of civilians and fighting between an array of armed groups and tribal militias has continued in eastern Congo despite an April peace accord between the Kinshasa government and foreign-backed rebel factions meant to end nearly five years of a war which has left three million people dead.

Neighboring Burundi, itself embroiled in a civil war that has killed 300,000 people, has long complained that Burundian rebels have bases inside Congo, which they say are used to mount cross-border attacks.

Wednesday, Burundi's Tutsi-dominated government signed a new peace accord with the FDD aimed at ending the decade-long conflict, but the FNL rejected the deal.
   
10/10/03 15:51 ET
    
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