Top Italian envoy killed in Congo ambush
Guard, driver also slain in kidnap attempt
• Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo was one of three men killed Monday in an attack on a United Nations convoy in the east of the country.
Luca Attanasio was gunned down with Vittorio Iacovacci, an Italian military police officer, and their Congolese driver, who has not been named, when their World Food Program convoy was stopped on the road.
Sergio Mattarella, the Italian president, condemned the “cowardly attack.”
“The Italian republic is in mourning for these servants of the state who lost their lives,” he said.
Luigi Di Maio, the Italian foreign minister, left an EU summit in Brussels early to return to Rome and promised an investigation.
Marie-therese Tumba Nzeza, the DRC’S foreign minister, offered Italy condolences and said her country would “do everything to find out who is behind this despicable murder.”
The three men were travelling in a two-vehicle convoy without an armed escort to visit a school food program.
Carly Nzanzu Kasivita, the governor of Northern Kivu, said they were stopped about 16 kilometres outside the regional capital of Goma by six attackers in an apparent kidnap attempt. A patrol of national park rangers intervened and managed to free four people.
“Unfortunately before they ran away the assailants shot the ambassador and his bodyguard. They killed a Congolese driver at the start of the attack,” Kasivita told the BBC World Service.
The WFP said the road had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts.
Attanasio, 43, had been Italy’s head of mission in Kinshasa since 2017 and was made ambassador in 2019. Emanuela Del Re, a former deputy foreign minister, described him as “a man gifted with uncommon courage, humanity and professionalism.”
The UNHCR says more than 2,000 civilians were killed in the DRC’S eastern provinces of North and South Kivu and Ituri last year.
Dozens of armed groups are active in and around the Virunga national park, a vast reserve along Congo’s borders with Rwanda and Uganda that is home to a quarter of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas.
They have killed more than 200 park rangers and kidnapped tourists in attacks stretching back over a decade.