Two observers from the UN MONUC mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had gone missing in country's troubled Ituri province, were "savagely killed", a MONUC spokesman said Monday. "We can confirm that they are dead," spokesman Hamadoun Toure told AFP.
| "You don't want to know the details. After all, we're talking about Congo, here..." |
The bodies of the two men — a Jordanian and a Nigerian — were taken back to the city of Bunia on Sunday night. The UN mission, which had 20 military observers in the eastern DRC province, lost contact with the two men on Wednesday. MONUC also has some 700 troops stationed in Bunia, the province's main city. A statement from the UN mission said that a team from MONUC had managed to reach the town of Mongbwalu, 70 kilometres (45 miles) north of Bunia on Sunday, where it found that the bodies of the military observers had already been buried. Namanga Ngongi, the UN's special representative in the DRC, condemned the "ignoble and revolting" attacks on the observers, who had been in the region for a month to support the country's peace process. All the UN's observers who had been operating outside Bunia were brought back to the town two or three days ago for security reasons, the UN said.
| Like I say, if you're gonna use peacekeepers, they'd better be better armed and more dangerous than the guys they're trying to control. "Observers" are just another target set... |
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