Five killed in rebel attack in restive DR Congo province

BENI: Five people were killed overnight in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni by rebels from the Allied Democratic Forces, a notorious militia blamed for hundreds of deaths, local sources said Thursday.

"In the morning, five bodies were found in Mutuanga after an ADF attack at night. This afternoon the death toll rose to 11," Donat Kibwana, the top official in Beni, in North Kivu province, told AFP.

But the Kivu Security Tracker and a local civil society official put the toll at five.

The civil society official, Paluku Batoleni, said the attack in Kibuana -- about 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the Ugandan border -- took place at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) on Wednesday.

Twelve civilians and a soldier were killed in a weekend attack also blamed on the ADF rebels also in an area of North Kivu near neighbouring Uganda dubbed the "Triangle of Death".

The ADF has killed 570 civilians since the army launched a crackdown against them in November last year, according to experts.

The militia, which originated in the 1990s as a Ugandan Muslim rebel group, is one of more than 100 armed groups that trouble the eastern provinces of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo.

The attacks are apparently reprisals for the army operation or designed to warn locals against collaborating with the army.

But since April last year, some of the attacks have been claimed by the Islamic State.