Ituri: more than 22 people killed in different armed attacks in Irumu and Djugu
Armed men assimilated to the rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have again attacked this Sunday, villages in the territories of Irumu and Djugu, in the province of Ituri in the east of the DRC. The provisional toll is 22 people killed and several others injured. Local civil society denounces the inertia of the administrative and security authorities. INFO SOS Médias Burundi
This Monday, the Convention for the Respect of Human Rights (CRDH), branch of Irumu takes stock of the passage of the attackers in these entities.
Christophe Munyanderu, Coordinator of the CRDH in the region speaks of at least twelve bodies of the victims found and still lying on the ground.
Among the twelve, seven civilians were killed in the forests located west of the village of Mambelenga precisely in Kalemi 2km from the RN4 and RN 5 (national road number 4 and 5), other people were murdered in Apakolu in the forests west of Otomabere village.
The CRDH denounces a form of negligence on the part of the administrative and security authorities which causes the ADF rebels to multiply attacks in the area.
It wants “the involvement of the Congolese government to stop the massacres”.
“If today the ADF can multiply attacks in the chiefdom of Walese-Vonkutu it is because there is a kind of negligence on the part of those who have the power in their hands, but also we have found that the territory of Irumu does not have competent deputies who can hustle the central government just so that the killings of civilians by the ADF in the south of the territory of Irumu can be a concern in the National Assembly”, regrets he.
Elsewhere in the territory of Djugu, still in the province of Ituri, ten people were killed in a shootout by men carrying firearms around 7 p.m. on Sunday February 12, 2023 in the Depot district, in the rural commune of Mongbwalu.
According to a political activist quoted by the local press, these murders were perpetrated in different business houses. After the package, the armed men who would be in a car disappeared into the wild.
Other sources report that several unidentified number of people were injured.
The two territories have been plunged into a security crisis following the violence of local and foreign armed groups for several years.
Some had agreed to observe a ceasefire last December during the talks in Nairobi (Kenya), in vain.
Several thousand inhabitants have been forced to flee their homes and find refuge in camps for internally displaced people in the same province. But there too, as the victims told Pope Francis when he met the victims of the atrocities and violence committed in eastern Congo in early February, the displaced constantly experience murders, rapes and other abuses.
