Twenty people were killed Friday afternoon, April 8, in a new attack attributed to ADF groups, affiliated with the Islamic State group, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, according to local sources.

"The enemy ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) ambushed farmers on Friday around 16 p.m. (14 p.m. in universal time, editor's note) near the village of Enebula," Patrick Mukohe, vice president of local civil society, said by phone.

He claims to have counted himself 21 bodies of men and women at the site of the massacre, located about thirty kilometers west of the city of Oicha.

"I have just received 19 bodies, all killed by machete," Jules Kambale, embalmer at the morgue of Oicha hospital, told AFP.

The military administrator of Beni territory, Colonel Charles Ehuta Omeanga, confirms this attack which he attributes "to ADF terrorists" but reserves the toll of victims "until (his) elements return from the field."

In a video shared on social media - and authenticated by Patrick Mukohe - a crowd surrounds the body of a man tied to a wooden frame, his throat cut. Men film his corpse, placed on a tarpaulin at the foot of a dump truck where other bodies are piled up, wrapped in body bags.

As the bodies arrived at the Oicha morgue, youths tried to block the nearby national road in protest. They were quickly dispersed by the police "who came to crackle bullets to clear the road," says the vice-president of civil society. "The situation here is catastrophic," he concludes.

More than 60 deaths in one month

On Thursday, the UN said that at least thirty people had been killed by the ADF on April 2 and 3 in Ituri province, and more than sixty deaths were attributed to the ADF in March alone in North Kivu province.

The ADF is behind the predominantly Muslim Ugandan rebels who have taken root since the mid-1990s in eastern DRC, where they are accused of massacring thousands of civilians.

They pledged allegiance in 2019 to the Islamic State group, which presents them as its branch in Central Africa.

The United States announced in early March that it was offering a reward of up to five million dollars for information that could lead to its leader, a Ugandan man in his forties named Musa Baluku.

With AFP

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