Booby trap mines threat

A new generation of landmines that target the engineers sent to clear them are in use in Angola, heightening the risk for deminers operating in the embattled country, mine experts told IRIN on Wednesday. The booby trap devices “turn up from time to time in Angola,” Colin King of the London-based ‘Jane’s Intelligence Review’ said. They are no bigger than a cigarette packet, can be motion or light sensitive, or can be set off by the magnetic influence of a deminer’s detector. “There is some question over how many accidents they have caused, and over where they have come from,” King told IRIN. Last year, the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) lost a colleague in Angola’s western Moxico province to a booby trap device attached to an anti-tank mine that was being defused. “He was following standard procedures, but it (the mine) had a switch mechanism on it that was triggered by magnetic influence. The switch mechanism was traced back to South Africa,” Richard Forsythe of MAG told IRIN. The existence of booby trap devices in Angola “is in the forefront of our teams’ minds,” Forsythe said. Shortly after the incident, amid renewed mine laying by both sides in the Angolan conflict, MAG’s operation in Moxico was shut down. MAG’s focus has since switched to Kunene province in southern Angola. Running a demining programme in the middle of a war “is always a dilemma,” Forsythe added. But, “the work that we are doing is helping communities, and we are not aware of any new mines being laid in the province we are working in.”