AfricaNews monitoring desk
Hardline and renegade General Laurent Nkunda of DR Congo is under lock and key after resisting a joint Rwandan-Congolese military operation in eastern Congo, the operation's joint command said on Friday. The Tutsi rebel leader was arrested in Rwandan territory. A lot of locals hailed his arrest.
"The joint operations command ... informs the public that the ex-general Laurent Nkunda was arrested on Thursday, January 22 at 2230 hours while he was fleeing on Rwandan territory after he had resisted our troops at Bunagana with three battalions," a Congolese/Rwandan official statement said on Reuters news website.
Nkunda has led a Tutsi rebellion in eastern DR Congo since 2004. A joint Congolese-Rwandan military operation is currently underway to hunt Rwandan Hutu rebels operating in Congo.
In the joint operation aimed at pacifying eastern Congo, more than 3,500 Rwandan troops have crossed the border into Congolese territory to join Congolese government forces in trying to disarm Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels.
The Rwandan Hutu rebel FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) movement, which emerged after Rwanda's 1994 genocide, is widely viewed as the root cause of more than a decade of instability in east Congo, which has included Nkunda's rival Tutsi insurgency.
Late last year, Nkunda led fighters from his rebel Tutsi National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) in an offensive in Congo's North Kivu province which displaced more than a quarter of a million civilians.
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