KINSHASA - The Democratic Republic of Congo government dismissed Tuesday Human Rights Watch charges that Lord's Resistance Army rebels had killed around 300 people in December, saying "no more than 25" had died. Officials in the neighbouring Central African Republic announced meanwhile new LRA attacks this month in which they said 15 of the rebels and 10 civilians were killed, one of them a woman burnt alive. Human Rights Watch at the weekend accused the Ugandan group, whose leaders are wanted for war crimes, of massacring 321 civilians and abducting 250 others in a previously unreported four-day "rampage" in northeastern DRC in December. The UN mission in the DR Congo (MONUC) said Tuesday its own investigation, not yet officially released, found that at least 290 people were killed and about 150 abducted. DR Congo's Justice Minister Lessa Bambi Luzolo said the HRW claim was "clearly exaggerated". "When it comes to victims in the civilian population, the number of victims is no more than 25," he said in a statement in Kinshasa. "There were no massacres as stated in the report, but a few people attacked in passing by uncontrolled elements" of the LRA, Luzolo said. "It's about events that happened in December 2009 and the non-governmental organisation speaks about it as if it was yesterday," he said. The LRA took up arms against the government in northern Uganda in 1988 but since 2005 moved into the remote northeast of the DR Congo after coming under pressure from the Ugandan army. A senior officer in the DR Congo army also threw doubt on the HRW report, which the Ugandan army questioned on Monday. "To say that the LRA are an organised structure with the capacity to commit such massacres, that's not reality," said General Jean-Claude Kifwa, commander of the region where the attacks occurred. He said rebels were under control, except for a few isolated cases, and the "number of LRA rebels who could still be wandering in this country is no more than 30".
