Government offers $5,000 bounty for urban assassins

The transitional government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has offered a reward of US $5,000 to anyone with information regarding a group of assassins who have been terrorising the capital, Kinshasa, and other cities across the country, Interior Minister Theophile Mbemba said at a news conference on Monday. Mbemba's declaration followed the assassination of a government official either late Sunday or early Monday, despite increased efforts by the government to reign in rising urban crime. "We will not be so naive as to issue this reward without verification," Mbemba said. "We must be convinced, and any information provided to us will first be carefully examined by experts." For its part, a national human rights NGO, Groupe Jeremie, denounced the killing of Steeve Nyembo, head of human resources of the government tax service. "Soldiers found him in his house. He had been shot in the knees and stomach before being burned alive in his kitchen with the use of gasoline, as his children were locked in another room," Groupe Jeremie said in a communique issued on Monday. Human rights groups said the killing was similar to that of Louis Mpozi, the deputy director of the state-owned telecommunications company, the Societe Generale des Telecommunication. A representative of Groupe Jeremie, Phili Kompany, told IRIN that Mpozi was never a member of government, or of a political party. However, Kompany said, Mpozi was close to his brother, Mwami Pierre Nadatabayi, a Mayi-Mayi militia leader since 1998. "Those who killed him did not take a single thing from his house, which leads one to believe that this was some kind of settling of accounts," Kompany said. On 20 September, the DRC's national unity government announced it would crack down on crime in Kinshasa, as well as in other cities across the vast central African country. [See earlier IRIN story, "Government to battle increased crime in Kinshasa and other cities"] "After having enjoyed a period of calm, we now have armed groups terrorising the country," Mbemba said, condemning the assassinations as "villainous and hateful means of trying to settle accounts". For the past week, reinforced and mixed patrols comprising elements of all former belligerents - the former Kinshasa government; the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie, the Mouvement de liberation du Congo and other former rebel movements; and the Mayi-Mayi militias, have been patrolling the streets. The government has said that it would provide daily food rations to some 200,000 of these law enforcement officers.