Share & more
Humanitarian workers in Guinea said on Friday that recent cross-border attacks from Liberia and Sierra Leone were endangering nearly 500,000 refugees from those two countries.
After Wednesday's attack on the town of Pamalap, on the border of Sierra Leone, Guinean troops encircled a refugee camp about 13 km away to prevent retaliatory attacks by Guinean civilians, Chris Ache, the resident representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Conakry told IRIN.
Suspected Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels killed at least 27 people in the raid on Pamalap, said Ache, who visited the village on Thursday. "All the shops are looted, some homes were burned down. It was completely deserted. Only the army was there," he said.
Angry Guineans have stormed the Conakry homes of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in search of weapons over the past week and authorities are trying to prevent demonstrations to call for the expulsion of the refugees.
[For full story see separate item titled `GUINEA: Fears of reprisals against refugees']
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions