“After preventing him from entering a crowded bar, the suicide bomber detonated his bomb at the entrance. The provisional toll indicates the death of six people, including the bomber, and the wounding of 13 people, who were taken to area hospitals,” said a statement by the spokesman for the military official in Beni. .
Colonel Narcisse Mutiba, the military official in the city of Beni (North Kivu province in the east of the country), had previously announced that “a bomb, an explosive device, exploded in the center of Beni.”
An AFP correspondent said he saw three corpses torn apart at the scene of the explosion, inside a restaurant, amidst the remains of tables, chairs and cups.
Two witnesses told AFP that more than 30 people were celebrating Christmas in the restaurant when the bomb exploded.
“I was sitting there,” Nicholas Equila, a radio presenter at the local station, told AFP. “A motorbike was parked there. Suddenly the motorbike exploded and a deafening sound was heard.”
On June 27, Beni witnessed the explosion of a homemade bomb in a Catholic church, causing two injuries, and on the same day a man was killed when a bomb he was carrying exploded.
This came the day after an explosive device exploded near a gas station, without causing any damage.
The Congolese and Ugandan armies have been waging a joint operation since November 30 against the Allied Democratic Forces in the Beni region, in the Congolese state of Ituri.
The last two strongholds captured are in the center of the Virunga National Park in southern Beni.
The Allied Democratic Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (ADF) have been active since 1995 in the border areas with Uganda, and are considered the deadliest armed group responsible for the killing of thousands of civilians.
Uganda also holds it responsible for recent attacks that were claimed by ISIS, which describes the group as its “state in Central Africa.”
On March 11 of this year, the United States included this group on its list of terrorist organizations, after it considered it affiliated with ISIS.
On December 19, the two armies announced the destruction of the group’s strongholds and camps in bombing operations in several areas in Beni and Ituru.
The Ugandan army confirmed at the time that operations would “intensify in several sectors, after the terrorists were defeated from their former strongholds.”
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