GOMA, DR Congo
A United Nations peacekeeper from South Africa was killed and another wounded in an attack on their helicopter in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday, the organisation said.
The aircraft came under fire
at around 3:00 pm (1200 GMT) during a flight to Goma, the provincial capital of
Nord-Kivu province, where it was able to land, a spokesman told AFP.
The source of the fire that
struck the helicopter was not yet known and its precise location had yet to be
determined, said Amadou Ba, a spokesman for the UN mission in the DRC
(MONUSCO).
South Africa's military also
confirmed the incident.
"An Oryx helicopter came
under fire in Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Sunday February 5,
2023," the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) said in a
statement.
"A crew member was fatally shot, another suffered injuries but managed to continue flying the chopper and landed safely at Goma Airport.
"The SANDF is in the
process of informing family members of the soldiers who were involved in this
unfortunate incident."
MONUSCO chief Bintou Keita
said she "strongly condemns this cowardly attack on an aircraft bearing
the UN emblem", adding that "attacks against peacekeepers can
constitute a war crime".
UN Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres called on Congolese authorities "to investigate this heinous
attack and swiftly bring those responsible to justice", said his spokesman
Stephane Dujarric in a statement.
On March 29, 2022, eight UN
peacekeepers -- six Pakistanis, one Russian and one Serb -- were killed when
their helicopter crashed over a combat zone between the Congolese army and M23
rebels.
Militias have plagued the
mineral-rich eastern DRC for decades, many of them a legacy of regional wars
that flared during the 1990s and the early 2000s.
Since November 2021, the M23
rebel group has seized chunks of territory and come within miles of the east's
main commercial hub Goma.
East African leaders called
Saturday for an immediate ceasefire in eastern DRC, at an extraordinary summit
called to find ways of calming the raging conflict.
The talks were hosted in
Burundi by the seven-nation East African Community (EAC), which is leading
mediation efforts to end the fighting in the vast central African nation.
The resurgent M23 has taken
control of swathes of land in the mineral-rich east and fighting is continuing
despite a peace roadmap hammered out in Angola last July, and the deployment of
an East African Community force in November.
The DRC is awash with minerals
and precious stones, but the decades of war and chronic mismanagement mean that
little of the vast wealth trickles down to the population of some 100 million. - AFP
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