At least 10 people have been killed in a night attack on the city of Beni in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) when the civil society group and a monitoring body blamed the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) for the refusal.
Residents said a group of assailants had set fire to several houses in the middle of the night in the city’s Beu district, shooting at people as they left the buildings and attacking some with machetes.
The raid took place just four days after the city, home to thousands of displaced people fleeing surrounding areas due to violence, was hit by two explosions, which officials also blamed the ADF.
Hundreds of people took to the streets of Beni on Thursday morning to protest the government’s failure to protect the city. Some built makeshift barricades while others burned tires.
“So far we have seen ten bodies ourselves and have just transported one body on a wagon to the mortuary,” said Protestant Kathembo Ngeleza, who woke up by gunfire during the night after attending a party celebrating Congo Independence Day. “We do not know what our authorities are doing. The idea is to protect the inhabitants, but here we are again … We are really angry,” he added.
Gloire Kivetya, chair of a body representing civil society groups in the Benis Beu district, blamed the attack on the ADF, an extremist militant group claiming links to Daesh. Kivu’s security tracker also said that the ADF was a suspect. There was no immediate claim and the ADF could not be reached.
The ADF has been accused of killing thousands of people since 2014, mostly in more remote areas. The army blamed the ADF for two explosions that hit Beni on Sunday, in which only one attacker was killed. The city’s mayor closed schools, churches and markets for 48 hours as a precautionary measure.
The government declared martial law in northern Kivu and Ituri, two provinces bordering Uganda, in early May in an attempt to quell a violent outcry. But the number of civilians killed in such attacks has increased since then, according to the Kivu Security Tracker, which charts unrest in eastern Congo.
There are almost 700,000 internally displaced people in Beni’s territory, of whom 57,000 are in the city itself, the UN said in a report on Tuesday.
.
