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| Africa |
| Two observers reported missing in Congo |
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by
Reuters Reporter, 20 June 2003
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13:00:19
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Two United Nations observers went missing in the northeastern Congolese town of Beni after being taken from their office by unidentified people, a UN spokesman said on Friday.
The disappearance late on Thursday follows the killing of two other observers with the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Monuc) last month in a similarly remote area of the vast country, the size of western Europe.
The UN mission said it had no information on who had taken the two men and declined to reveal their nationalities.
“They were taken to an unknown destination by unknown people,” Monuc spokesman Hamadoun Toure said by telephone from the Congolese capital Kinshasa. “We’re trying to find out what happened to them,” he said.
Beni lies 110 kms (70 miles) to the southwest of the Congolese town of Bunia, where an international force composed mainly of French troops began deploying this month to shield residents in the town from tribal bloodshed.
Monuc, which began deploying observers in Congo in 2001 to monitor a ceasefire deal, is a separate mission from the new force in Bunia, and contains troops from various countries.
Fighting between groups of rebels and militia has broken out in the areas around both towns in recent weeks, strands of a broader web of conflicts in a war that has killed some three million people since 1998, mainly through disease and hunger. |
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