Village attacks leave 11 dead

Eleven people were shot or hacked to death when unidentified assailants attacked a village in the volatile cocoa-growing western region of war-torn Cote d’Ivoire, hospital and police officials said on Tuesday. The assailants, armed with traditional hunting rifles and machetes, left 10 dead in the farming village of Zouan, some 20 km from the town of Guiglo, after attacking in the early hours of Monday, said Paul Gouagouehe, an official at Guiglo hospital. The eleventh victim, a woman with serious machete wounds to the neck, died in hospital, he added. Gouagouehe said three young men and a woman had been kidnapped following the attack. An officer at the local gendarmerie, who asked not to be named, confirmed the deaths of 11 people but could not confirm the kidnappings. Western Cote d’Ivoire saw some of the fiercest fighting in the country in the early days of a September 2002 rebellion that split the country in two and led to the creation of a UN peacekeeping mission in April 2004. The western region too has frequently been the scene of ethnic strife. After a series of deadly ethnically motivated clashes in Guiglo in 2005, the violence spread in May to nearby Duekoue, where scores of people were killed and thousands of men, women and children displaced. Last month, anti-UN protests forced humanitarian agencies and peacekeepers to withdraw from Guiglo and the nearby area after UN offices, vehicles and bases were torched and ransacked. UN officials told IRIN that an evaluation mission would return to the area this week to assess the possibility of restoring humanitarian operations to thousands of refugees in the troubled region. [COTE D IVOIRE: Lust for cocoa land feeds ethnic killings]