Angolan children recount raid

An 18-year-old girl who survived a UNITA raid last Saturday on a school just outside Caxito, about 60 km from the capital Luanda, said she avoided being kidnapped by pretending she could not walk on her prosthetic leg, the BBC reported. Sixty children, most of them war refugees from all over the country, were still missing on Friday after being abducted.

Speaking to journalists for the first time, Maionga Isaura said she had no problem walking on the artificial limb, but that when the soldiers arrived in the small hours of Saturday morning she pretended to have difficulty. She was quoted as saying that she was walking between two buildings in the school compound when she saw two men in uniform. She thought they were policemen until they started firing shots in the air and were joined by about 50 other armed men. The girl said the children locked themselves in their dormitories, but opened up when the soldiers started banging on the doors because they feared they would be shot if they resisted. She said the rebels took clothes and bedding from the dormitories before marching the children to a storeroom, where they helped themselves to supplies of food. The older children were forced to carry sacks of food weighing up to 50 kg.

Meanwhile, the report said, humanitarian officials have been compiling a list of the abducted children to help them in the search. Nineteen of them were under 14 years old - some of them as young as 10. The raid occurred at the same time as an attack on the town of Caxito, in which more than 70 people were killed. According to the report, the attack suggested that the rebels were able to mobilise closer to the capital than was previously thought.