Two soldiers and two women died overnight in attacks in Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-torn North Kivu province, the army and a local official said Saturday.
Rwandan Hutu rebels attacked an army position at Mutabo killing the Congolese soldiers, local military spokesman Major Guillaume Djike told AFP.
The Allied Democratic Forces was blamed for a separate raid on Mukoko village where two women died and hostages were taken, a local administrator said.
Witnesses said a group of people had gathered in Beni town when the women’s bodies were brought in but police dispersed them to head off any protests.
“They killed two women,” Beni administrator Donat Kibwana told AFP, saying it was not immediately clear how many people had been kidnapped by the militia.
The army has accused a coalition of foreigners from neighboring countries of being behind the repeated raids in eastern DRC and vowed to wipe them out.
On September 24, one person was killed and 17 were kidnapped in Oicha, around 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of Beni, where days earlier at least 18 people were killed by men wielding machetes and firing guns. Both incidents were blamed on the ADF.
Foreign humanitarian workers have been stationed in Beni, near the border with Uganda, since early August to deal with a new Ebola outbreak in the region.
The provinces of North and South Kivu lie in a border region that has seen war and lower-level conflict since 1994.
The ADF is a militia initially created by Muslim rebels to oppose Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, but also operates in the DRC.
The group has been in the east of the country since 1995 and is accused by the United Nations and Congolese authorities of committing a series of civilian massacres since 2014.
Local anger has surged with the latest attacks, directed at repeated failures by the authorities to curb the violence.
With reporting from AFP