Attack on border village reported

Authorities in Guinea have accused armed men allegedly based in Liberia of attacking a village 25 km inside the border and killing a number of people.

News reports citing government officials said up to 47 people were killed in the town of Massadou on Friday. Guinean soldiers were reported to be among the dead. There was no immediate independent verification of the report and it was unclear if the other casualties were Guineans or Liberians. Thousands of refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone are camped in Guinea.

The troublesome and resource-rich border area of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone is inaccessable to humanitarian workers because of insecurity. Guinea and Liberia have been trading accusations for more than a year about rebel incursions from across each other’s borders.

Liberian President Charles Taylor says dissidents allied with former Liberian faction leaders, whom he once fought as as a rebel leader, are using bases in Guinea to destabilise his government. On Monday, Taylor accused Kamajor fighters from Sierra Leone of joining the dissidents. The Kamajors, also known as Civil Defence Forces, have been backing President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in Sierra Leone’s war, which began in 1991 with a rebel incursion from Liberia.

Fighting is reportedly ongoing in the northern Liberian county of Lofa, which borders Sierra Leone and Guinea. The last remaining international humanitarian agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), pulled out of Lofa in July. An assessment team traveled to central Lofa on Friday and only a trickle of displaced civilians were sighted, an MSF worker told IRIN. The town of Zorzor, which dissidents had claimed to have captured, is calm and under government control, the aid worker said.