MSF says two staff kidnapped in Congo safe, but still in captivity
(AP)
5 June 2005
KINSHASA - A French aid group said on Sunday two of its staff kidnapped last week by gunmen in eastern Congo were alive and safe, though they were still being held in captivity.
The French aid worker and Congolese driver working for the medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres were pulled from their vehicle Thursday near a displaced camp in northeastern Ituri province.
�We have information that indicates they are safe,� charity spokesman Aymeric Peguillan said by telephone from Geneva. �But that�s all we can disclose. We�re still in a very sensitive stage.�
Peguillan declined to say when the information was received or who the charity had been in contact with.
According to the aid agency�s Web site, the aid workers� vehicle was stopped by gunmen outside the Gina displaced camp in eastern Congo, 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Bunia, capital of Ituri province. The gunmen forced the two out of their vehicle and led them into the bush.
The aid group had been providing emergency medical care to displaced people in the area for four months.
More than 30,000 have fled to the Gina camp since December, after ethnic Lendu militia began a series of murderous raids on villages. More than 100,000 people still live in three different camps in the region.
The French aid group has 37 international staff in Ituri and 600 local staff.
The Geneva-based group has been working in Ituri since June 2003, when the hill-swept province was being torn apart by clashes between ethnic Lendu and Hema militia, who routinely conducted grisly massacres in rival villages. Fighting between Hema and Lendu militia has killed over 60,000 people in Ituri since 1999.
The Ituri conflict has been a bloody sideshow to Congo�s larger, six-year, six-nation war that killed nearly 4 million people, mostly from war-induced starvation and disease, aid groups say. That war ended in 2002 and a transitional government was established in the capital, Kinshasa.
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