Rivals blame each other for envoy’s killing in DRC
The body of the Italian ambassador killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo was flown to Rome, as Rwandan Hutu rebels denied involvement in his death and blamed the armies of the DRC and Rwanda.
Luca Attanasio, 43, died on Monday after a World Food Programme convoy was ambushed in the eastern DRC.
His Italian bodyguard, Vittorio Lacovacci, and Congolese driver Moustapha Milambo also died in the attack.
An Italian military plane carrying Attanasio and Lacovacci’s flag-draped coffins was met at Ciampino Airport in Rome by Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio and Defence Minister Lorenzo Guerini joined him to meet Attanasio’s widow and three daughters, who flew home with the bodies.
“He was always a person who was focused on other people,” the ambassador’s father, Salvatore Attanasio, told Italy’s Ansa news agency. “The memories of a lifetime passed by in 30 seconds. The world caved in on us.”
The DRC’s Interior Ministry on Monday blamed the killings on “members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda” – a Rwandan Hutu rebel group that has operated in the region for more than a quarter of a century.
But the FDLR rejected the allegation, blaming the Rwandan army and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a statement received by AFP on Tuesday.
It said the ambassador’s convoy was attacked near the Rwandan border, “not far from a position of the FARDC”.
“The responsibility for this despicable killing is to be found in the ranks of these two armies and their sponsors who have forged an unnatural alliance to perpetuate the pillaging of eastern DRC,” it said.
An expert at the Kivu Security Tracker, a US monitor, said that the Hutu rebel group, however, were a known presence in the region.
“The FDLR are near the place where the attack took place. It’s in the realm of possibility that the Rwandan rebels are responsible,” the expert said.
Scores of militias roam the DRC’s four eastern provinces, many of them a legacy of wars in the 1990s that claimed millions of lives.
Monday’s attack occurred north of the North Kivu capital of Goma on National Highway 2 – a road that runs through thickly forested, mountainous terrain next to the border with Rwanda.
The convoy was ambushed near Kiwanja by six assailants armed with five AK-47 assault rifles and a machete.
“They proceeded by firing warning shots before forcing the people in the vehicles to get out … shooting dead one of the drivers to create panic,” a government spokesman said.
Park rangers and army troops nearby heard the noise and pursued the attackers.
“Five hundred metres [from the site of the ambush] the kidnappers fired point-blank at the bodyguard, who died on the spot, and at the ambassador, hitting him in the abdomen,” the spokesman said.
The DRC Interior Ministry said security services and provincial authorities had not been informed of the trip in advance.
“[They] were unable to provide special security because of a lack of information about their presence in this part of the country, despite its reputation for instability,” it said.
But the WFP said the road had been cleared for travel without security escorts. A UN official in the DRC said that meant there should be at least two vehicles travelling together.