Uganda captures Congo rebels
2008-01-09 21:06
Kampala - Uganda has captured 11 members of a Congolese rebel group led by dissident General Laurent Nkunda and handed them over to Congolese authorities, army officials said on Wednesday.
The rebels armed with assault rifles were arrested on Sunday and Monday in the Bunagana Kisoro district of Uganda, close to the border with Democratic Republic of Congo.
"We have captured 11 Congolese rebel combatants in Uganda," said Lieutenant Tabaro Kiconco, deputy military spokesperson in western Uganda.
The men reportedly came from a training camp for Nkunda's National Council for the Defence of the People (CNDP) located near his base at Kyanzu in northeastern Congo, 32 km from the Ugandan border.
They were handed over to the Congolese army late on Tuesday in Kasindi, North Kivu, officials said.
"We have received 11 members of the CNDP," Colonel Delphin Kahimbi, operations commander of Congolese government forces in North Kivu, told Reuters.
The rebels are being transferred to the provincial capital Goma, where they will be interrogated, he said.
The Ugandan army has deployed troops along the porous, mountainous border with eastern Congo and was investigating more possible incursions by Congolese rebels, Kiconco said.
The border districts of Kisoro and Kanungu have been attacked four times by Congolese groups leaving half a dozen people dead in the last year.
"We have maintained a strong presence at the border to make sure that wrong elements don't cross into Uganda," said Kiconco.
More than 400 000 North Kivu residents have been forced to flee clashes over the last year between soldiers, Nkunda's insurgents, local Mai Mai militia and Rwandan rebels, despite the end of Congo's broader 1998-2003 war.
Nkunda launched his insurgency in 2004 saying he would protect his fellow Tutsis against FDLR attacks. Fighting resumed in late August after Nkunda abandoned a Rwandan-brokered peace accord and pulled his fighters out of the army.