Aid workers killed in Congo

KINSHASA, Congo -- Six Red Cross workers have been shot and hacked to death in northeast Congo, according to the international aid agency.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said the group was on a routine evaluation trip when coordinators at Geneva headquarters lost contact with the personnel.

The bodies of four Congolese nationals, one Swiss and one Colombian were later discovered by a Ugandan military patrol on the road 70 kilometres (40 miles) north of the northeastern town of Bunia on Thursday.

Some of the six had been shot; others had been both shot and slashed with machetes, said Boni Mbaka, a U.N. official in Bunia, who saw some of the bodies, Associated Press reported.

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"It's very horrible. There were no survivors (so) it's difficult to say what happened," Mbaka said.

The workers had been heading to a remote health centre with medicine, said Paul Castella, head of the Red Cross delegation in Kinshasa.

The killings occurred in Ituri province, which is under the control of the Congolese Liberation Front, a Ugandan-backed rebel group led by Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Fighting between Hema pastoralists and Lendu farmers for control of rich grasslands had decreased recently following peace talks.

"We didn't consider that a particularly dangerous area," Castella said.

The Red Cross immediately suspended operations in the area as a mark of respect for the dead, spokesman Michael Kleiner told CNN.

A decision would be made later on whether to withdraw about 20 expatriates and 200 Congolese staff from east Congo.

"We would need to know more about the circumstances and motives behind the killings before we can evaluate what to do," spokeswoman Antonella Notari said in Geneva.

It was the worst single attack against the Red Cross, a neutral Swiss-run humanitarian agency, since 1996 when six nurses were slaughtered in their sleep at a hospital in Chechnya. Three Red Cross workers were killed in Burundi the same year.

Notari said the dead were 36-year-old Swiss nurse, Rita Fox, and a 54-year-old Colombian relief worker, Julio Delgado.

The four Congolese staff were nurse Veronique Saro, 33; Unen Ufoirworth, 29, a staff member in charge of reuniting families separated by the fighting; and drivers Aduwe Boboli, 39, and Jean Molokabonge, 56.

The Red Cross expressed its "heartfelt sympathy to the families of the deceased, who gave their lives for the ideal of solidarity with the victims of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"Profoundly grieved by this tragedy, it condemns in the strongest terms this attack and the flouting of the Red Cross emblem," it said.

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Red Cross
U.N. Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Lusaka Ceasefire Document
Permanent Mission of the Democratic Republic of The Congo
Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement
Jane's Information Group: Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire)
Human Rights Watch: Democratic Republic of Congo report
The International Rescue Committee
  • Congo Mortality Study
Congo Defense Fund (CDF)

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