More than 50 civilians were killed when machete wielding militiamen attacked a site for displaced people in strife torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) .
A source with the UN’s peacekeeping mission Monusco said, Fifty two people, some of them children, were killed adding that 36 were wounded.
United States based Kivu Security Tracker (KST) said the suspected attackers, carrying edged weapons, were from a notorious armed group called Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (Codeco), blamed for a string of ethnic massacres in the area.
The communication ministry said in a tweet that regular army troops stopped the attack, while Monusco tweeted that its peacekeepers helped quell the attack, which took place in the Djugu area near Lake Albert.
Fighting between the two groups flared between 1999 and 2003, claiming tens of thousands of lives before being quelled by a European Union peacekeeping force, Artemis.
According to the Danish Refugee Council, Codeco attacks have caused hundreds of deaths and prompted more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes, while half of the region’s population faces food insecurity, according to the Danish Refugee Council.
The latest assault targeted the camp for displaced people, where more than 24,000 took refuge following violence in Djugu in 2019.