The mayor of a large city in the eastern half of the Democratic Republic of the Congo said rebels killed dozens of people in nighttime raids on his city Wednesday.
Nyonyi Bwana Kawa, mayor of the eastern city of Beni, said members of the Allied Democratic Forces and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda crept into homes and killed at least 26 people.
A spokesman for the DRC army in the North Kivu province, Lieutenant Colonel Olivier Hamuli, said the “people were killed with knives and machetes.”
Hamuli confirmed the attackers were ADF-NALU.
The group has terrorized eastern DRC since the1990s, when its members were chased into Congo by the Ugandan army.
For a limited period of time recently, the ADF-NALU violence slowed, following attacks against the ADF-NALU early this year by the Congolese army with United Nations support.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo said Wednesday that ADF-NALU fighters had killed 15 people, including six children between the ages of 7 and 17, in raids in the same area between October 5 and 8.
