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Gunmen kill ranger in DRC
31/08/2007 15:06 - (SA)
Goma - Suspected Rwandan Hutu rebels killed a park ranger in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the latest attack on guards who protected rare mountain gorillas in a national park, said officials on Friday.
The attack late on Thursday on the ranger station at Kabaraza, 95km north of the North Kivu provincial capital, Goma, followed the killings of five of the endangered gorillas in recent weeks in Virunga National Park.
Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which supported the protection programme for the Virunga gorillas, said: "About 23:00, a ranger on night watch heard noises coming from some of the rangers' houses. He went there to find out what was going on and was shot in the belly."
The ranger died from his wounds, and a worker at the camp was injured by a bullet in the neck. Houses were looted.
Several rangers killed
Other rangers who drove the attackers off said they spoke Rwandan and were believed to be members of the largely Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group, which operated in eastern Congo.
Several rangers had been killed in Virunga, Africa's oldest national park located near the intersection of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Conservationists were fighting to save the estimated 700 mountain gorillas that remained in central Africa.
Thursday's attack came in the same turbulent area of eastern Congo, where government troops had been battling soldiers loyal to a renegade general, Laurent Nkunda.
On Thursday, thousands of civilians fled the fighting, which had shattered a seven-month-old truce signed by Nkunda and dampened hopes of stabilising eastern DRC after landmark national elections held late last year.
The recent slayings of gorillas shocked conservationists, who suspect the killings were linked to a power struggle between local government agents trying to save Virunga and those engaged in the illicit trade in the charcoal made from its trees.
Under the DRC's late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Virunga was a major tourist draw, but years of insecurity and the 1998-2003 war that killed an estimated four million people, mainly through hunger and disease, had led to a dwindling number of visitors.
- Reuters
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