In the latest spate of violence in the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a man was killed Tuesday during a protest against United Nations peacekeepers, a police spokesperson said.
The U.N. troops had been passing through the town of Beni in North Kivu province when protesters on motorbikes blocked their way and started throwing stones. The troops fired shots to disperse the crowd, according to police spokesperson Nasson Murara. "Unfortunately, in this mess of bullets, there was a stray that hit a driver, who is dead," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Police have launched an investigation to "identify the perpetrators of these shots," Murara said. The unrest follows deadly protests in July against the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the DRC, known as MONUSCO.
According to a Congolese toll, 32 demonstrators and four U.N. troops died over the course of a weeklong disturbance and U.N. bases were ransacked.
An estimated 120 armed groups roam eastern DRC, many of them a legacy of two regional wars that flared in the last decade of the 20th century.
Many Congolese are frustrated by MONUSCO's perceived ineffectiveness in the face of persistent violence. The U.N. first deployed an observer mission to eastern Congo in 1999.
It became the peacekeeping mission MONUSCO – the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – in 2010, with a mandate to conduct offensive operations. It has a current strength of about 16,000 uniformed personnel.
