At least ten people were murdered overnight in a raid on the city of Beni in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, witnesses claimed.
A civil society organization and a monitoring group also said Islamist extremists were suspected of carrying out the assault.
Residents claimed a gang of assailants set fire to numerous homes in the city’s Beu neighborhood in the middle of the night, shooting at people exiting the buildings and assaulting others with machetes.
The attack came only four days after the city, which is home to thousands of displaced persons who left neighboring areas due to violence, was struck by two explosions which officials also blamed on Islamists.
On Thursday morning, hundreds of people went to the streets of Beni to protest the government’s inability to safeguard the city. Some persons constructed makeshift barricades, while others set fire to tyres.
“So far we have seen ten bodies ourselves and have just transported a body on a cart to the morgue,” said protestor Kathembo Ngeleza, who was woken up by gunfire during the night after attending a party celebrating DRC’s Independence Day.
“We don’t know what our authorities are doing. The idea is to protect the inhabitants, but here we are again … We are really angry,” he added.
Gloire Kivetya, president of a group representing civil society organizations in Beni’s Beu district, blamed the assault on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist militant group that claims ties to the Islamic State. Additionally, the Kivu Security Tracker said that the ADF was suspected.
No immediate claim of responsibility was made, and the ADF could not be reached. Since 2014, the ADF has been accused of murdering thousands of civilians, mainly in rural areas.
The army has accused the ADF for two explosions that occurred in Beni on Sunday, killing just one assailant. As a precaution, the city’s mayor closed schools, churches, and marketplaces for 48 hours.
At the beginning of May, the government imposed martial rule in North Kivu and Ituri, two provinces bordering Uganda, in an effort to calm a spike in violence.
However, according to the Kivu Security Tracker, which tracks violence in eastern Congo, the number of people murdered in such assaults has risen since then.
The United Nations said on Tuesday that there are almost 700,000 internally displaced persons in Beni territory, 57,000 of whom live in the city.
