Thirty-seven people including a priest and three nuns have been killed by Rwandan-backed rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a Rome religious news agency reported yesterday.
MISNA agency, citing missionary sources in the central African country, said the rebels carried out "a summary execution" at a Roman Catholic mission in Kasika, 80km from the eastern city of Bukavu, on Monday night.
It said the massacre was a reprisal for an attack last Sunday on rebel forces in Mwenga, 120km from Bukavu near the Rwandan border.
MISNA, whose report was issued by the press office of the Vatican, said the priest and nuns belonged to the congregation of the Sons of the Resurrection.
Meanwhile, the President, Mr Laurent Kabila, predicted crushing victory in Congo's civil war yesterday as rebels fighting to topple him said Zimbabwean and Angolan warplanes were bombing them on two fronts.
Mr Kabila returned to Kinshasa for the first time in more than a week as state radio announced a string of victories for the government and its foreign allies in the west.
His return was evidence of the growing confidence of his government as an alliance of Congolese, Zimbabwean and Angolan troops and warplanes halted and threatened to reverse previous gains by the rebel army south-west of the capital.
"The result is certain. They will lose the war everywhere . . . Victory belongs to the Congolese people," Mr Kabila told state radio and television at the airport in Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo.
"The people must be completely mobilised and armed to crush the aggressors," he said, urging villagers across the vast central African nation to use traditional weapons such as spears and bows and arrows if that was all they had.
Angolan army units continued to pour into the former Zaire and advance towards rear rebel positions south of Kinshasa.
Congolese state radio said the Congo river port of Boma had been retaken from the rebels, sealing off their last line of retreat.
An Angolan government newspaper said yesterday more than 940 people were killed in Sunday's battle for Kitona.
Both Rwanda and Uganda have denied taking part in the fighting, but have warned they might step in if the Zimbabwean and Angolan troops do not pull out.
"Our view, which we have made absolutely clear, [is that] where it comes to genocide, the matter ceases to be an internal matter," the Ugandan minister of state for foreign affairs, Mr Amama Mbabazi, said.
"We are not prepared to have another genocide like [in Rwanda] in 1994."
The South African Foreign Minister, Mr Alfred Nzo, will lead a delegation to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, Luanda and Kinshasa in an effort to bolster the diplomatic effort to get a ceasefire implemented, a statement from his office said.