Mozambique: Villagers find human remains amid homes destroyed in rebel attack

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Mozambique: Villagers find human remains amid homes destroyed in rebel attack

9:16 CAT | 08 Feb 2022

FILE PHOTO - For illustration purposes only.[File photo: Lusa]

Residents of a village in Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, on Sunday found the remains of three people amongst the rubble of buildings destroyed in an attack attributed to rebels, they told Lusa.

“We were going to look for rope to rebuild our houses destroyed by insurgents when we felt a strong smell: we got closer and saw that there were human bones,” said one of the residents of the village of Citate, in Meluco district, who was accompanied by another resident. “We suspect that they are people who were killed at the time of the January attack.”

Two bodies lay together near the village, while a third was discovered in a more remote location, the resident said. The latter body was identified as that of a 63-year-old man known as “one of the big shoemakers” in that area and who had been missing since the day of the attack.

“He fled alone and we found him about four kilometres from the village,” the same resident added.

A military offensive backed by forces from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), ongoing since July 2021, has helped overcome rebel operations in Mocímboa da Praia and Palma, near major gas projects in the north of the province.

Meluco, along with Macomia, has since September 2021 been among districts in southern Cabo Delgado targeted by scattered attacks by armed groups thought to be on the run from that offensive.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Wednesday that the province had been experiencing a “new peak of attacks and violence” in recent weeks that had caused “another wave of thousands of displaced people in just a few weeks at the end of January, the largest recorded in recent months.”

MSF cited “more than 20 attacks on four villages in the past two weeks, with 2,800 houses damaged or destroyed in Meluco district and areas in southern Macomia district” and added that “aAt least 14,000 people have had to flee in search of safety and basic means of survival.”

Source: Lusa