UN: More Than 250 Killed in Congo in 3 Months

U.N. human rights investigators have issued a new report documenting the killings of more than 250 people, including 62 children, in violence in central Congo over three recent months that could devolve into “wider ethnic cleansing.”

The investigators based the report on interviews in June of 96 people who fled Congo’s Kasai provinces into neighboring Angola. It decried alleged violence involving a new militia, Bana Mura, backed by Congolese security officials.

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein urged Congo’s government to “act now to prevent such violence from tipping into wider ethnic cleansing.”

His office provided pictures of survivors with long scars and dismembered limbs from the violence. Zeid described accounts of “the screams of people being burned alive” and others who were “cut down.”