This Sunday the discovery of seven bodies in an advanced state of decomposition on the outskirts of the town of Mangina, Beni territory, in the Congolese province of North Kivu, was reported.
The governor’s delegation in Mangina has indicated that the victims were villagers who were executed with machetes by militiamen of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), linked to the Islamic State, before the attack by this group in which three people died last Sunday. also in Mangina.
“They are residents of my town. The bodies were found in their fields, outside my commune. The day the ADF had planned to come and attack Mangina, any peasant they found was massacred,” said the mayor of Mangina, Rocky Muvunga. , in statements to the Congolese portal Actualité.
The bodies were located by young people from the area who alerted the wazalendo (patriots in Swahili), the self-defense groups. “We discovered seven bodies, including those of two women near Taha and Basisale. Wazalendos from Butuha accompanied us. All the bodies were buried and decomposing,” said a local youth leader, Kakule Mbafumoja.
The ADF is an extremely violent Ugandan group created in the 1990s to which the United Nations has charged, among other crimes, the murder of 1,200 civilians in 2021.