Militants assaulted a displaced people’s camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ituri region early Monday, killing at least 46 people.
The attack on the Lala camp was blamed on the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO), a militia operating in the country’s violent east.
According to Reuters, the chief of Bahema Badjere District, Jean Richard Lenga, armed men massacred 46 people with knives and firearms and torched others in their homes in the middle of the camp.
“The whole village is in mourning now, it’s too sad,” he added, adding that authorities were still looking for remains and that the number of casualties was anticipated to climb because many of the camp’s huts had been burned down. Many citizens, according to Lenga, fled to the nearby town of Bule, where a United Nations peacekeeping base is located.
“They started firing shots, many people were burned to death in their homes, and others were killed with machetes,” civil society advocate Desire Malodra told AFP. Charite Banza, the chairman of another local human rights group, told Reuters that the victims would be buried in a mass grave.
The attack on Monday comes after a similar one on Saturday, also blamed on CODECO, in the Djukoth district of the province’s Mahagi territory, which killed seven people.
The CODECO militia, mostly drawn from the agriculturalist Lendu ethnic group, which has a long-standing conflict with Hema pastoralists, is accused of often targeting displacement camps. Last year, it is claimed to have killed 60 people at a displaced persons’ camp in eastern DRC.
Earlier this year, seven individuals were reportedly killed in the northeastern region, including five children, and mass graves containing the dead of 49 residents were uncovered in two villages in Ituri.
