Carly Nzanzu Kasivita, governor of North Kivu, said the attack took place in an area where Rwanda’s Democratic Liberation Forces have been active for a long time, but that investigations continued. The group is one of the largest foreign armed groups in the country, a rebel group with links to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
“According to initial investigations, they were killed by a group of six people who spoke Kinyarwanda,” said the governor in a telephone interview, referring to the language spoken in Rwanda.
The convoy was traveling from Goma to Rutshuru, a city about 72 kilometers to the north, on a route that would take vehicles through Virunga National Park, although it is unclear where exactly the attack occurred. The World Food Program said several others were injured in the attack.
The attack comes at a time when a wave of violence has engulfed the area in recent weeks, with a deadly attack by a different militia in Virunga National Park leaving six people dead last month.
Virunga, Africa’s first national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is known as home to the region’s famous mountain gorillas, threatened with extinction. But the North Kivu region has also been the scene of regular violence, as the contagion of conflict between the government and militia groups, as well as the consequences of neighboring conflicts, has occurred there.
Last year, 17 people were killed in another attack in Virunga, one of the deadliest in the park in recent years, which is also believed to have been executed by the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda.
In the years since it gained independence in 1960, after a brutal colonial period, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been devastated by civil wars and for decades by the government of a succession of corrupt dictators.