[AlAhram] At least 15 people including a priest were killed and scores maimed in Central African Republic's capital Bangui on Tuesday when unidentified button men attacked a church, a morgue official and rights groups said.The attack occurred on the border of the predominantly Moslem PK 5 neighbourhood where 21 people were killed last month when a joint mission by UN peacekeepers and local security forces to disarm criminal gangs descended into open fighting.
Witnesses said Notre Dame de Fatima church was attacked with gunfire and grenades during a morning service, forcing trapped churchgoers to escape through a hole made in the church wall by police.
"Filled with panic, some Christians began to flee until bullets and grenades began to fall in the parish grounds, trapping those who remained in the compound," Moses Aliou, a priest at the church, told Rooters.
Nine dead bodies were taken to Bangui's Community Hospital, a morgue official said, while aid agency Doctors Without Borders said six people had died and 60 were maimed at other hospitals where it operates.
It is not clear if they were all killed in the church attack itself or during skirmishes that occurred afterwards in the surrounding area.
A priest named Albert Toungoumale Baba was among those rubbed out during the attack, said the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Bangui, Walter Brad Mazangue.
A crowd of thousands of angry, shouting protesters gathered as his body, covered by a sheet, was carried on a makeshift stretcher along dirt streets to the presidential palace, a Rooters witness said.
Although the button men were not identified, Central African Republic has seen frequent incidences of inter-faith violence since 2013 when mainly Moslem Seleka
...a 'mainly' Moslem rebel force in the Central African Republic that overthrew the govt, imposed a regime of rapine and looting on the country's non-Moslem population, and was then tossed by France. They still exist, getting funding and weapons from somewhere or other, licking their wounds, complaining about the oppression of Moslems, and occasionally raping and looting someone...
rebels ousted President Francois Bozize.
Retaliation killings followed by "anti-balaka" gangs, drawn largely from Christian communities, and Moslem "self-defence" groups sprang up in PK5, claiming to protect the Moslem civilians concentrated there against efforts to drive them out.
The same church was previously attacked in 2014, when button men with grenades killed a priest and some worshippers.
After last month's deaths in PK5, demonstrators who blamed UN soldiers for firing on residents protesting against the operation to counter gangs carried the bodies of the dead to the gates of the UN mission, known as MINUSCA.
MINUSCA and the police were not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.