Italian ambassador Luca Attanasio killed in Congo during attack on UN food aid convoy – World News , NewsGater

Archive image of Italian Ambassador Luca Attanasio. Image courtesy: @DDIndialive

Rubber: Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo was killed on Monday when a UN convoy was attacked in the troubled east, sources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the government in Rome said.

Luca Attanasio died from his injuries after a convoy from the World Food Program (WFP) was attacked near Goma while on a field trip to the region, said a high-level diplomatic source in Kinshasa. Two other people were also killed, said Major Guillaume Djike, a spokesman for the army in North Kivu province. AFP.

Other sources said those two deaths were the envoy’s driver and bodyguard, and the WFP said “other passengers” were injured. Attanasio’s death was confirmed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi offered his “deepest condolences”, while President Sergio Mattarella condemned the “cowardly attack”.

“The Italian republic is in mourning for these state servants who lost their lives,” Mattarella said in a statement. And Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio expressed “great dismay and immense pain”, interrupting a meeting in Brussels with his EU counterparts to return soon to Rome.

“The circumstances of this brutal attack are not yet known and no effort will be spared to clarify what happened,” Di Maio said, paying tribute to the victims as “two servants of the state.”

Attanasio, 43, had been representing Italy in Kinshasa since 2017, the Foreign Ministry said. He joined the diplomatic service in 2003 and previously worked in Switzerland, Morocco, and Nigeria.

The envoy suffered “gunshot wounds to the abdomen” and was taken to a hospital in Goma in critical condition, the diplomat said in Kinshasa. The DRC army said its troops were searching the area for the attackers.

Region in trouble

A vast country the size of continental western Europe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo faces numerous conflicts, especially in its remote, mineral-rich east.

Dozens of militias roam the four eastern provinces, many a legacy of wars in the 1990s that swept through countries in central and southern Africa and claimed millions of lives.

According to the Italian Foreign Ministry, the ambassador and the policeman were with a convoy of MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo.

But the WFP confirmed that Attanasio was on a fact-finding mission with the UN food agency. “The delegation was traveling from Goma to visit a WFP school feeding program in Rutshuru when the incident occurred,” it said in a statement.
“The attack … occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts,” he said.
Monday’s attack occurred north of Goma, in Nyiaragongo territory.

Armed groups in the area include a Rwandan Hutu militia called the FDLR, as well as the M23, also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army. The region includes the Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a vast wildlife reserve that is home to a quarter of the world’s critically endangered mountain gorilla population.

More than 200 of the park’s rangers have been killed in attacks dating back more than a decade. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said last week that more than 2,000 civilians were killed in North and South Kivu and Ituri province last year.

Attanasio is the second European ambassador to be assassinated while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In January 1993, French ambassador Philippe Bernard was assassinated during riots in Kinshasa caused by troops opposing dictator Mobutu Sese Seke.