SOUTH KIVU, DR Congo: Up to 37 people including women and children were killed in Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern province of South Kivu on Saturday morning in an attack that the regional governor blamed on a dispute over cattle.
The victims, who included several pregnant women, had been shot, stabbed or burned inside their homes. A Reuters cameraman on the scene counted 37 bodies, some of them lying inside a village church. “It is Congolese who have carried out these attacks. It was about a dispute over cows,” South Kivu governor Marcellin Cishambo told Reuters. “The problem is that everyone in this area carries a weapon.”
He gave a lower estimate of 27 for the number of dead.
South Kivu, a mountainous region rich in minerals including gold, is home to members of tribe who fled neighboring Burundi after the end of a civil war in 2005.
Dozens killed in DR Congo violence
Dozens killed in DR Congo violence
