DRC troops nab 47 rebels
2005-09-16 08:58
Bukavu - Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) armed forces have captured 47 rebel soldiers implicated in an uprising last year led by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, a DRC military official said on Thursday.
The arrests in the eastern region of Sud-Kivu, near the Burundi-Rwanda border were confirmed by the Monuc United Nations peacekeeping mission in the regional centre of Bukavu.
The armed troops are suspected of involvement in a short-lived takeover of Bukavu in June 2004, led by Nkunda and dissident colonel Jules Mutebusi who said they sought to stop alleged massacres of ethnic Tutsis.
Both are the subject of international arrest warrants for insurrection.
Soldiers nabbed after crossing the border
Among the arrested group were medics and a number of officers, including "Mutebusi's former right-hand man Colonel Eric Rurihombere", said a DRC military official in Sud-Kivu.
The soldiers were intercepted by rebel Rwandan Hutus after crossing the border from Burundi before DRC armed forces took them into custody on Wednesday at Lemera, near the frontier, the official said.
They were transferred to a military base and would be brought to Bukavu in coming days, the official said.
The rebels probably decided to return to the DRC because their leader Mutebusi, who fled to Rwanda after government troops regained control of Bukavu, was under house arrest in the national capital Kigali, a Monuc official said.
However, Nkunda is understood to be still at large in the Nord-Kivu region.
On Tuesday, he released a statement saying he did not intend to "relight a war" in the country's eastern regions except in legitimate self-defence.
He said he was clarifying a previous declaration that aroused fears of renewed conflict in a country scarred by cycles of civil war that claimed about three million lives between 1998 and 2003.