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Last Updated: Feb 18th, 2008 - 14:39:01 |
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations will be a month late on its urgent inquiry into the killing of eight Guatemalan peacekeepers during a botched hunt for a Ugandan rebel leader in Congo in January, officials said on Thursday.
The U.N. report on the investigation, which had been due out this Friday, will now not be completed until mid-March, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.
The eight "Kaibil" Special Forces soldiers were killed and five others wounded January 23 during what the U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo has acknowledged was an ambush during a botched secret mission to try to capture or kill Vincent Otti, the deputy commander of Uganda's notorious Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
A U.N. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the soldiers' recovered bodies had shown signs of torture, and the Paris newspaper Le Monde said some had been beheaded.
But U.N. officials have insisted there was no evidence the peacekeepers had been tortured or mutilated.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote the Guatemalan foreign minister shortly after the killings to say the world body expected to complete its "urgent investigation" into the operation by this Friday.
But the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, told headquarters on Thursday that the probe was not yet done.
In addition, the report now being prepared was only a preliminary field inquiry, which when completed would be transmitted to MONUC headquarters in Kinshasa for submission to a formal board of inquiry which would not complete its work until mid-March, the officials said.
It was as yet unclear whether MONUC or Annan intended to make the report public, the officials said.
Annan and U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno, asked about the report, said they had no information on it.
Led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, the LRA 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.
LRA fighters have also crossed borders to wreak havoc in Sudan and Congo. The new International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for the top LRA leaders.
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