KINSHASA, Congo – The Italian ambassador to Congo, an Italian Carabinieri police officer and his Congolese driver were killed Monday when gunmen attacked a UN convoy that was going to visit a school in eastern Congo, the Italian Foreign Ministry said. residents.
The ambush occurred while the convoy was traveling from Goma, the regional capital of eastern Congo, to visit a World Food Program school project in Rutshuru, the UN agency said.
The WFP said the attack occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts and was seeking more information from local authorities about the attack. Eastern Congo is home to a myriad of rebel groups, all competing for control of the mineral-rich Central African nation the size of Western Europe.
Luca Attanasio, Italy’s ambassador to the country since 2017, Carabinieri officer Vittorio Iacovacci and his driver were killed, the Foreign Minister said. Other members of the convoy were injured and were taken to a hospital, the WFP said.
The attack, a few kilometers north of Goma, was close to Virunga National Park. North Kivu Governor Carly Nzanzu Kasivita said UN vehicles were hijacked by the attackers and taken into the bush. The Congolese army and park rangers in Virunga National Park came to help those who were attacked, he said.
“There was an exchange of fire. The attackers fired on the bodyguard and the ambassador, ”said the governor, adding that the ambassador subsequently died from his injuries.
Attanasio, a 43-year-old career diplomat, left a wife and three young children.
The attack took place in the same area where two Britons were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in 2018, said Mambo Kaway, head of a local civil society group.
“The situation is very tense,” he added.
More than 2,000 civilians were killed last year in eastern Congo due to the violence of armed groups whose brutal attacks have also displaced more than 5.2 million people in what the UN calls one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Congo Foreign Minister Marie Tumba Nzenza sent her condolences and promised the Italian government that the Congolese government would do everything it could to find those responsible for the deaths.
Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Mario Draghi also expressed their condolences to the victims’ families.
“The circumstances of this brutal attack are not yet clear and no effort will be spared to clarify what happened,” said Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio.
Di Maio was flying from Brussels to Rome to meet Draghi and inform Italian lawmakers about the attack. The Rome prosecutor’s office routinely conducts investigations of Italian victims of crimes abroad.
A special Carabinieri investigative unit has been directed to Kinshasha and is due to arrive on Tuesday, Italian state TV reported.
After exercising diplomatic functions in Switzerland, Morocco and Nigeria, Attanasio was assigned to the Italian embassy in Kinshasa in September 2017.
Last October, he received the Nassiriya International Peace Prize at a ceremony held in a church in southern Italy. Attanasio was cited for “having contributed to the realization of important humanitarian projects, distinguished by altruism, dedication and a spirit of service to people in difficulty,” reported the newspaper La Repubblica.
He quoted Attanasio as saying that “everything we consider natural in Italy is not in the Congo, where, unfortunately, there are so many problems to solve”.
Attanasio described the ambassador’s role as “above all, being close to the Italians, but also contributing to achieving peace”. About 1,000 Italians live in the Congo.
Congo suffered one of the most brutal colonial reigns in the world before going through decades of corrupt dictatorship. Later, consecutive civil wars involved several neighboring countries. In January 2019, Congo experienced its first peaceful democratic transfer of power since independence in 1960, following the election of President Felix Tshisekedi.
The UN peacekeeping mission has worked to reduce its presence of more than 17,000 soldiers in the country and to transfer its security work to the Congolese authorities.