Malanje shelled

UNITA rebels this week again shelled the besieged government-held town of Malanje in what witnesses described as a devastating artillery barrage.

Malanje, some 450 km east of the capital, Luanda, has been the scene of sporadic shelling for at least three months during which the city has been crammed with tens of thousands of internally displaced people.

Sources in Angola told IRIN on Thursday that they could not give a death toll for the latest shelling on Wednesday. But local media reports said at least three homes in the city had been levelled to the ground in the barrage killing and wounding several people.

Malanje is one of the few remaining cities which WFP has been able to supply by road, despite a spate of recent hit-and-run attacks. So far, IRIN was told, no humanitarian vehicles have been attacked.

In a separate incident reported on Thursday by the official 'Jornal de Angola', UNITA guerrillas killed five people and burned 14 lorries when they ambushed a goods convoy at Carangola in the southwest Benguela Province.

It said the attack was reported by survivors who fled to the central highlands city of Humabo. Their vehicles, it said, were carrying supplies for Huambo which has been under siege since December when the 1994 UN-brokered peace accords between the government and UNITA broke down plunging the country into renewed warfare.