OWN CORRESPONDENT, Luanda | Tuesday 3.10pm.
THE South African government said on Tuesday that it will do everything possible to negotiate the release of two South Africans who were taken hostage in an attack on a Canadian-owned mine in Angola on Monday. Speaking in Pretoria, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said that five people, including two South Africans, were taken hostage during a predawn attack on a mine at Yetwene, in northeastern Angola. “We are doing everything to see whether we can achieve the release of the hostages,” he said.
It has also been determined that at least seven people were killed in the attack, rather than five as was thought earlier.
Pahad said the Angolan conflict has become a war, and that no-one’s safety can be assured in the country anymore.
TUESDAY, 10.00AM:
FIVE people were killed and four were taken hostage in a pre-dawn attack by dozens of armed men on a Canadian-owned mine in northeastern Angola, the mine operators said Monday.
Two Britons, the mine manager and a director, were killed as well as a Portuguese and two Angolans, the company’s spokesman, Michael Grunberg said here.
Four others, all expatriates including a British geologist, were taken hostage and two others are missing, he said. Eighteen Angolans were injured.
The attack occurred at 4.00am on the mine at Yetwene, in the northeast of the country, DiamondWorks said in a statement from its headquarters in Vancouver.
It said the identity of the assailants could not be confirmed, but that witnesses said several wore the uniform of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), which has refused to complete disarmament according to peace agreements signed in Lusaka in 1994.
The Angolan government, formed by the formerly Marxist Angolan People’s Liberation Movement (MPLA), has long accused Unita of failing to abide by the 1994 peace deal, by keeping 30000 men at arms, and refusing to turn over important towns and districts to central administration.
DiamondWorks said in a statement that it deeply regretted the senseless loss of life “and calls for the international community to condemn this shameful act of violence.”
The deaths may call fresh international attention to a conflict largely overshadowed by that in Angola’s northern neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo. — AFP