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Troops attached to the U.N. mission, known as MONUSCO, killed
one person during a protest in the rural area of Oicha, its
mayor Nicolas Kikuku told Reuters.
"They (the protesters) set fire to two bridges that lead to the
(peacekeepers') base," Kikuku said. "The MONUSCO peacekeepers
did not accept that and opened fire directly on the
demonstrators."
Rosette Kavula, the deputy administrator of Beni territory,
where Oicha is located, and Philippe Bonane, a local activist,
also said peacekeepers had killed a protester.
The incident came after days of protests in several eastern
Congo cities by young people angered over the 12,000-strong U.N.
mission’s failure to prevent a wave of civilian killings by
armed groups.
MONUSCO spokesman Mathias Gillmann said the mission was
investigating what had happened in Oicha.
The other fatality occurred when protesters closed a road to the
city of Beni, blocking the path of an ambulance carrying the
body of a man killed earlier in a suspected rebel attack, said
local army spokesman Antony Mwalushayi.
"That's how a woman was hit and died on the scene, and her baby
was seriously wounded," Mwalushayi told Reuters. He said an
investigation had been opened into the incident.
At least seven people were killed in the suspected rebel attack,
which officials blamed on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a
Ugandan Islamist group that has operated on Congolese soil for
decades.
More than 300 people have been killed so far this year in
violence in eastern Congo, which is in part an unresolved legacy
of a civil war that officially ended in 2003.
U.N. peacekeepers have been deployed to Congo since 1999 at the
invitation of the government.
(Reporting by Erikas Mwisi Kambale; Writing by Aaron Ross;
Editing by Mike Harrison)
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