United Nations peacekeepers have found over 100 bodies in three mass graves in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo, the country's UN mission said today.
A patrol of South African soldiers discovered the graves yesterday near the village of Maboya in troubled North Kivu province. A UN spokesman said a preliminary excavation of the site indicated they had not been dug recently.
"Apparently they were graves dating back to the 1990s, but it's difficult to know accurately," UN mission spokesman Kemal Saiki said. "The first one they excavated contained 100 bodies. The second was seven, and the third one they couldn't estimate."
Saiki said Congolese authorities were planning to investigate the site.
The central African nation's eastern borderlands have long been gripped by a conflict that grew out of neighbouring Rwanda's 1994 genocide, in which Hutu extremists slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Rebel leader Laurent Kabila launched his 1996 campaign to topple longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from the eastern border, with backing from the Tutsi-led government in Rwanda.
Human rights groups accuse Kabila's Rwandan-backed army of massacring tens of thousands of fleeing Rwandan Hutu refugees during their march on the capital, Kinshasa, in the west. The offensive toppled Mobutu and Kabila became president.
But he fell out with former allies Rwanda and Uganda, resulting in a war in the east from 1998 to 2003 that sucked half a dozen foreign armies and numerous foreign-backed rebel factions into a free-for-all over Congo's vast mineral riches. Kabila was assassinated during the war and replaced by his son, Joseph.
Reuters