25 civilians killed in attacks in eastern DR Congo, ADF militia blamed: Officials

Twenty-five people have been killed in a suspected militia attack in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni, where hundreds have died in violence since November, a local official said Wednesday, blaming the attack on the notorious ADF militia.

The army was chasing ADF fighters on Thursday when they found the bodies of 25 civilians, who had been "taken by surprise in their fields on New Year's Eve," Donat Kibuana, the administrator of the Beni territory, told AFP.

The ADF is one of more than 100 militias that plague the eastern provinces of the vast country and has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of civilians over the past year.

Brutal militia

The ADF, blamed for the deaths of more than a thousand civilians in Beni since October 2014, began as an Islamist-rooted rebel group in Uganda that opposed Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

It fell back into eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 during the Congo Wars and appears to have halted raids inside Uganda. Its recruits today are people of various nationalities.

UN experts estimated the ADF in 2018 to number around 450 fighters.

A report to the UN Security Council last week said the ADF seemed to follow an extreme Islamist ideology, but there is no information on whether the group had links with international jihadist groups.

(With inputs from agencies)