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DRC: Italian ambassador killed by non-jihadi Hutu rebels
More on this story from yesterday, which has been moved to Page 3: Non-WoT.
[AnNahar] Italia's ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
 was among three people killed on Monday when a U.N. convoy was ambushed in the country's troubled east, an attack the government blamed on a Rwandan Hutu rebel group.

Luca Attanasio died of his wounds after a World Food Program (WFP) convoy came under gunfire near Goma while he was on a field trip, a senior diplomatic source said in Kinshasa.

The Italian government confirmed Attanasio's death and said an Italian policeman, Vittorio Iacovacci, as well as a driver it did not identify, had also died.

The DRC's interior ministry, in a statement, blamed the attack on "members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR)," a Rwandan Hutu rebel group that has plagued the region for more than a quarter of a century.

According to a US monitor, the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), 122 gangs were active in North and South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika provinces last year.
Four people were kidnapped, one of whom was later found, it said.

The DRC's army said its troops were searching the area for the assailants.

- TROUBLED REGION -
A vast country the size of continental western Europe, the DRC is grappling with numerous conflicts, especially in its remote, mineral-rich east.

Scores of militias roam the four eastern provinces, many of them a legacy of wars in the 1990s that sucked in countries around central-southern Africa and claimed millions of lives.

According to a US monitor, the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), 122 gangs were active in North and South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika provinces last year. More than 2,000 non-combatants were killed, according to UN figures issued last week.

Monday's attack occurred north of the North Kivu capital of Goma, in Nyiaragongo Territory -- an area where the FDLR is one of a number of gangs.

Some of the founders of the FDLR were involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis but also Hutu moderates, were slaughtered by the Hutu majority.

The group is opposed to the current Rwandan government but has not launched any large-scale offensive in Rwanda since 2001.

In April last year, the FDLR was blamed for killing 12 rangers in the Virunga National Park, a UNESCO-listed wildlife reserve that is home to critically-endangered mountain gorillas.

Another group in the area north of Goma is a Congolese Tutsi group also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army, which took Goma in 2012-2013.

The WFP said Attanasio had been with it on a fact-finding mission.

"The delegation was travelling from Goma to visit a WFP school feeding program in Rutshuru when the incident took place," it said in a statement.

"The attack... occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts," it said.
Posted by: trailing wife 2021-02-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=595497