The search is still ongoing in the DRC, after the attack on a boat on the Congo River last week by armed assailants. The first assessment reports about ten confirmed dead and more than one hundred people missing. The hope of finding them becomes increasingly slim. This boat from Kinshasa was going to Mbandaka, in the north of the country, was the target of an attack by armed men in the territory of Kwamouth, the scene since March 2022 of ethnic violence. After about a month of calm, the attacks have resumed with renewed vigor in recent days.
With our correspondent in Kinshasa, Patient Ligodi
Masks on their faces and red bands around their heads, these men armed with guns and machetes travel aboard a motorized canoe. They have seriously disrupted navigation on this stretch of the Congo River in recent weeks.
Among their recent victims, there is in particular the customary chief of a village in Congo-Brazzaville. This situation has forced the authorities of this country to strengthen the security system at the border and to deploy its security services along the river.
Civil society and the inhabitants of Kwamouth say they are abandoned and are also calling for reinforcement from the FARDC naval force. According to the administrator of the territory and the local officials of the General Directorate of Migration, these armed men occupy several villages downstream from Kwamouth, as far as Nkana, near Kinshasa.
Before the barge attack on the Congo River, the localities of Tubakila and Kinsele had been targeted on 8 March. At least 12 people were killed, including 3 policemen.
For the President of the National Assembly, Christophe Mboso, these attacks now go beyond the framework of a simple community conflict. It is, according to him, an insurrectionary movement which is also spreading more and more near the capital.
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