UN Mission condemns armed attack on NGO employees

The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as MONUC, condemned on Wednesday an attack on four humanitarian workers in the embattled northeastern district of Ituri.

"This attack was on four members of the NGO travelling in a vehicle, one of whom sustained a bullet wound," Mamadou Bah, the spokesman for the UN mission, told reporters in the capital, Kinshasa.

He said unidentified men attacked employees of the French NGO, Premiere Urgence, on Monday in the locality of Bukiringi, 100 km south of Bunia, the main town in Ituri.

MONUC said the attack occurred in an area controlled by ethnic Ngiti militiamen who are under the control of the Front de resistance patriotique de Ituri. This group has attacked several international NGOs over the last two months, MONUC added.

"MONUC would like to remind all armed groups in Ituri that they are signed on to the peace process and disarmament," Bah said.

Ituri's armed groups signed an agreement, known as the Act of Engagement, in April, obliging them to surrender their weapons, end hostilities and accept to enter the demobilisation process. Some 15,000 fighters, among them 6,000 child soldiers from different ethnic militias in Ituri, are to be involved in this process.

However, disarmament has progressed slowly, nearly a month after its start. So far, just 535 former fighters have reported to demobilisation sites and 3,050 guns and ammunition were surrendered.

The attack on the NGO workers occurred just before 31 militiamen escaped from a police cell in Bunia. The state prosecutor in Ituri, Chris Aberi, said investigations were under way regarding the escape, in which two policemen were taken. It is unclear if they went willingly or were taken hostage.

"We are waiting for the deployment of the integrated national police, trained in Kisangani, because local police are made up of former militiamen and are often accomplices of their comrades," he said.

Fighting continues in Ituri, an area that has remained outside the ongoing political transition in the country that started in December 2002, despite the existence of a military court in Bunia and the deployment of a brigade of the new unified army.