An urgent UN inquiry into the killing of eight Guatemalan peacekeepers during a botched hunt for a Ugandan rebel leader in Congo in January has yet to be completed nearly four months after it was promised, a UN official acknowledged yesterday.
An initial investigation by a UN board of inquiry left too many questions unanswered, prompting UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno to inform the Guatemalan authorities a second investigation would be launched, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Eight "Kaibil" Special Forces soldiers were killed and five were wounded on January 23rd during what the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo has acknowledged was an ambush during a secret mission to try to capture or kill Vincent Otti, deputy commander of Uganda's notorious Lord's Resistance Army.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote to the Guatemalan foreign minister shortly after the killings to say he expected an "urgent investigation" to be completed by February 17th.
A UN diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said afterward the soldiers' bodies had shown signs of torture.
UN officials insist the bodies were not mutilated and showed signs only of combat. "The bodies were not mutilated, as had been reported in some press stories," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, said in the Congo capital, Kinshasa.
Autopsies were performed on the eight soldiers and their bodies were returned to Guatemala. Neither the government nor the United Nations has made the results public.
A team was being sent from New York headquarters to lead the expanded UN investigation into the operation, the official said. A military officer from outside the United Nations might be named to head to inquiry, the official added.
It remained unclear whether Mr Annan would make the findings public, the official said.
Led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army has for two decades terrorized communities in Uganda's remote north, killing tens of thousands of unarmed villagers, slicing off survivors' lips or ears and abducting more than 10,000 children as fighters, porters and sex slaves.
Its fighters have also crossed borders to wreak havoc in neighboring Sudan and Congo.