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Kabila residence burned down in DR Congo
by Staff Writers
Bukavu, Dr Congo (AFP) Dec 25, 2017


Soldiers arrested for trying to kill Guinea-Bissau army chief
Bissau (AFP) Dec 25, 2017 - Six soldiers were arrested in mid-December for an attempt on the life of Guinea-Bissau's army chief, AFP learned Monday from a military court source.

Two heads of the armed forces were murdered in 2004 and 2009 in coup-prone Guinea Bissau, where the army is often implicated in political crises that regularly rock the country.

The six detained men targeted General Biague Na Ntam, several sources told AFP, without elaborating on the circumstances of the assassination attempt.

"Their case has been heard and sent up to the military tribunal," said General Daba Na Walna, head of the country's high military court.

They were arrested on December 14 and 15, but this was only made public Monday. The six men are currently being held at a prison located at an air base.

Two majors, a captain and a lieutenant were based at barracks 150 kilometres east of the capital, Bissau, the military source and a human rights organisation confirmed.

"We gave the detained men buckets to wash in, toiletries," said Augusto Mario da Silva, President of Guinea Bissau's Human Rights League, adding that better conditions had been demanded for the soldiers, as well as the guarantee of defence lawyers.

The tiny west African state has been in the grip of a power struggle since August 2015, when President Jose Mario Vaz sacked then prime minister Domingos Simoes Pereira.

Guinea-Bissau has been plagued by military coups and instability since its independence from Portugal in 1974, with President Joao Bernardo Vieira assassinated in 2009 alongside General Tagme Na Waie.

A residence of President Joseph Kabila was burned down early Monday in a suspected militia attack that killed a police officer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, witnesses said.

So-called Mai-Mai armed groups were probably trying to steal goods from the building in Musienene, North Kivu province in the country's troubled east, according to a military official.

"The residence of the head of state in Musienene has been targeted in an attack from 03:00 (01:00 GMT) and then burned by the Mai-Mai," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"The attackers ransacked everything before setting the house and some vehicles on fire."

Kabila spends most of his time in the capital, Kinshasa, but is believed to have several homes across the country, including a farm.

Musienene regularly sees protests against Kabila's extended time in power and demonstrations over insecurity.

He has managed to cling to power despite his second and final term as president officially ending in December 2016.

Elections to replace him never took place and a deal was eventually brokered that enabled Kabila to stay in office until a vote that was due to be held in 2017. The poll has since been postponed until December 23, 2018.

"We saw the flames consume the residence of the president of the republic when we awoke," said Pascal Mukondi, a resident of Musienene.

Another resident said they "feared retaliation" from the army.

Armed Congolese groups and foreign forces control swathes of territory in North Kivu province and fighting is relatively common.

In a separate development, nine soldiers were killed in two ambushes by a suspected rebel militia group in South Kivu province, the military said Monday.

"The army recorded a loss of nine soldiers in two ambushes in the Baraka operational zone", a unnamed military official told AFP.

A lieutenant was killed on Sunday in the village Lweba, seven kilometres (four miles) from the Baraka district, the official added.

The other deaths came in an attack two days earlier.

"Our hospital received the bodies of eight soldiers killed by bullets on Friday," an official at a hospital in Lulimba, a village 60 kilometres south of Baraka, told AFP.

The military official accused the Mai-Mai militia of being responsible for both attacks, adding that DR Congo's army lost "important material".

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Dekergar Duko, a lean father-of-two who crushes rocks for a living, often reminisces during his days of backbreaking labour about his life under Liberia's warlord-turned-president, Charles Taylor. Living in a hovel metres (yards) away from the so-called "College of Knowledge" where the dreaded strongman trained child soldiers to kill, Duko recalls when times were so much more comfortable. ... read more

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