Fighters from the feared Armed Democratic Forces (ADF) group killed six civilians in an attack on the town of Beni in North Kivu province in DR Congo yesterday night, according to local civil-society leader Pepin Paluku Kavota.
He told reporters on Wednesday the militants targeted a district just a kilometre from army headquarters in the city of 400,000.
The dead included a 15-year-old boy and a 90-year-old woman, said Kavota, who urged security forces “to redouble their efforts”.
The same night, militants also killed at least three people in an attack on a village in the neighbouring Ituri province.
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‘This is a provisional number,’ local civil-society figure Gaston Kandole told reporters.
The village also lies near a Congolese military base.
The ADF — which the Islamic State group claims as its Central African offshoot — is active in both North Kivu and Ituri.
The group is among the most violent of the more than 120 militias that roam eastern Congo and has been accused of massacring Congolese civilians and carrying out terrorist attacks in neighbouring Uganda.
The DRC and Uganda launched a joint offensive against the ADF in November 2021 to crush the rebels, but violence against civilians continues.
Africa Daily News, New York had last week reported that there was serious tension last weekend as some Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels killed 13 people and torched a clinic in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to local officials.
The mayor of Lume in North Kivu province, Kasereka Ise Mighambo asserted that the ADF fighters had entered the town very late on Thursday where they went on to burn down a health clinic, killing four patients inside.
He further went on to add that the militants killed nine more civilians before retreating into Virunga National Park, a world-renowned wildlife haven in Congo’s conflict-torn east.
