On Sunday, a homemade bomb burst inside a Catholic church in Beni, in the DR Congo’s conflict-torn east, wounding two people barely an hour before a children’s Confirmation ceremony.
The explosion happened around 6:00 a.m. (0400 GMT), according to the director of police in Beni’s town hall, Narcisse Muteba Kashale, and specialists from the UN mission in DR Congo told AFP that “it is a home-made bomb, a device that was put up for an ambush.”
Two individuals were hurt in the incident, according to Beni’s vicar general Laurent Sondirya, which occurred before throngs had assembled for the Confirmation service.
“They were targeting a large crowd because the ceremony would bring together children, their parents and the faithful,” he told AFP, adding that “mass would not be postponed”.
Traces of blood could seen at the entrance to the church in the aftermath of the explosion, an AFP reporter said, while shards of glass where scattered inside and the sound equipment was destroyed.
It marks the first time a building belonging to the Catholic Church, the city’s largest religion, has been directly targeted in Beni territory, where the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia is accused of killing 6,000 people since 2013, according to the Catholic episcopate.
Two imams in Beni known for speaking out against the ADF violence were shot dead in May, one inside the city’s mosque and the other after evening prayers.
The ADF is the deadliest of an estimated 120 armed militia groups that roam the mineral-rich east of the vast central African country, many of them a legacy of two regional wars from 1996 to 2003.
It is historically a Ugandan Islamist group that has holed up in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since 1995.
The ADF is accused of killing hundreds of civilians since launching operations from a base in the jungle around Beni in November 2019.
