ADF rebels kill 19 civilians in eastern DR Congo

Attacks blamed on a notorious militia group left 19 civilians dead in the restive eastern DR Congo, local officials said on Sunday.

Nine people were kidnapped on Friday by the Allied Democratic Forces militia or ADF, and their bodies were found in the province of North Kivu, which borders Rwanda, regional administrator Donat Kibwana said, adding that their burials were under way.

The ADF has been blamed for killing around 500 people in retaliation for an army crackdown on their bases in the forests around the Beni region.

In the neighbouring Ituri region, ADF fighters attacked the village of Bukaka late Saturday and killed 10 civilians, local official Bananilao Tchabi told AFP. 

Civil society leader Raphael Bon Benogo said the victims were five men, three women and two children. "Some were killed with machetes and others with firearms," he said.

In another incident on Saturday in Fizi, in South Kivu province, gunmen from a "coalition of armed groups" attacked an army unit, killing two soldiers, a local army spokesman said.

Dozens of militia groups operate in eastern DR Congo, a legacy of the two Congo wars in the 1990s that pulled in neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda.

The army last year launched a campaign against the ADF after the militia was blamed for dozens of massacres in the region, which also struggles with inter-ethnic fighting.

The ADF is a mainly Muslim movement that originated in neighbouring Uganda in the 1990s, opposed to the rule of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

In 1995, it moved into the DRC, which became its base of operations, although it has not carried out attacks inside Uganda for years.