Press. Voanews.
At least 15
people including a priest were killed and scores wounded in Central African
Republic's capital Bangui on Tuesday when unidentified gunmen attacked a
church, a morgue official and rights groups said. The attack
occurred on the border of the predominantly Muslim PK 5 neighborhood where 21
people were killed last month when a joint mission by U.N. peacekeepers and
local security forces to disarm criminal gangs descended into open fighting.
Witnesses said
Notre Dame de Fatima church was attacked with gunfire and grenades during a
morning service, forcing trapped churchgoers to escape through a hole made in
the church wall by police. "Filled
with panic, some Christians began to flee until bullets and grenades began to
fall in the parish grounds, trapping those who remained in the compound,"
Moses Aliou, a priest at the church, told Reuters.
Nine dead bodies
were taken to Bangui's Community Hospital, a morgue official said, while aid
agency Doctors Without Borders said six people had died and 60 were wounded at
other hospitals where it operates. It is not clear
if they were all killed in the church attack itself or during skirmishes that
occurred afterwards in the surrounding area.
A priest named
Albert Toungoumale Baba was among those shot dead during the attack, said the
Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Bangui, Walter Brad Mazangue. A crowd of
thousands of angry, shouting protesters gathered as his body, covered by a
sheet, was carried on a makeshift stretcher along dirt streets to the
presidential palace, a Reuters witness said.
Although the
gunmen were not identified, Central African Republic has seen frequent
incidences of inter-faith violence since 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka rebels
ousted President Francois Bozize.
Retaliation
killings followed by "anti-balaka" armed groups, drawn largely from
Christian communities, and Muslim "self-defence" groups sprang up in
PK5, claiming to protect the Muslim civilians concentrated there against
efforts to drive them out.
The same church
was previously attacked in 2014, when gunmen with grenades killed a priest and
some worshippers. After last month's deaths in PK5, demonstrators who blamed
U.N. soldiers for firing on residents protesting against the operation to
counter armed groups carried the bodies of the dead to the gates of the U.N.
mission, known as MINUSCA.