UN peacekeepers in eastern Congo have found the bodies of at least six people believed to have been executed by soldiers, deepening suspicions of an ethnic terror campaign by rogue army groups.
The half-buried bodies were found by patrolling UN soldiers over the weekend at two abandoned military installations in troubled North Kivu province occupied until recently by Tutsi-dominated army brigades fighting Hutu rebels.
"They found them on the sites of Congolese army positions abandoned the week before," said Sylvie Van Den Wildenberg, spokesperson in North Kivu for Congo's UN peacekeeping mission, known as MONUC. "The state of decomposition showed that they had been there possibly a week."
The two camps, near the villages of Katweguru and Kiseguru 95 km (60 miles) north of the provincial capital Goma, had been occupied by soldiers from Bravo Brigade.
This is one of five mixed brigades created in an effort to bring peace to North Kivu by integrating into the army fighters loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda, who led a 2004 uprising to defend the rights of his Tutsi minority group.
The move has instead sparked fresh ethnic fighting and fuelled fears of renewed conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, which is recovering from a 1998-2003 war that killed an estimated four million people.
So far this year, more than 165,000 people have fled fighting in North Kivu between the Tutsi-dominated brigades and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a predominately Hutu Rwandan rebel group based in eastern Congo.