Ten people have been savagely killed in an attack by a new armed group identified as Shishikara in the Masisi region of the eastern Congolese province of North Kivu.
Civil society sources quoted by Radio Okapi reported the massacre, apparently perpetrated more than two weeks ago. They also denounced that this new militia has perpetrated numerous attacks against the civilian population of Boabo and Banyungu with total impunity. They are also attacking livestock on farms in the region.
A civil society leader from Masisi, Thélésphore Mitondeke, has assured that he has already alerted the competent civil and military authorities of these «serious abuses committed daily by these fighters».
However, a spokesman for the provincial government, Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Ndjike Kaiko, assured Radio Okapi that he was not aware of the existence of this new militia and undertook to verify this information.
In addition, a man in his 20s was killed on Sunday in an attack attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in Wangatsu, Eringeti commune, in Beni territory, also in North Kivu. Two other people were seriously wounded, according to the Congolese news portal Actualité, citing a provincial government spokesman.
ADF militiamen broke into Wangatsu at 8 a.m. Sunday morning and shot the victim before setting fire to his house. They also took away livestock before fleeing the area.
The ADF, a Ugandan group created in the 1990s particularly active in eastern DRC and accused of the killing of hundreds of civilians in this part of the country, could be trying to return to operate in Uganda, from where it withdrew in 2003 after a series of military operations that drastically reduced its capacity to carry out attacks in the country.
The group underwent a split in 2019 after Musa Baluku–sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States–swore allegiance to the jihadist group Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA), under whose banner it has been operating ever since. The increase in his attacks and the claim of an attack in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, led both countries to launch joint operations in eastern DRC.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
