Congolese forces have retaken a southeastern town from a mysterious armed group and killed 30 of the rebels, a provincial governor said on Saturday. The gunmen took the town of Kilwa earlier this week, prompting an international company running a nearby copper and silver mine to suspend operations and evacuate some staff. "Soldiers advanced on the rebels and retook the town yesterday. The situation is calm and the town is under the control of the loyalist troops," Kisulu Ngoy, the governor of Katanga province, said. "There was fighting yesterday and 30 rebels were killed. We captured six of the rebels," he said by phone from the provincial capital Lubumbashi, adding 10 civilians had drowned in a nearby river as they tried to escape the fighting. The rest of the rebels, thought to number about 100, fled into the bush, Ngoy said. The group's attack caused alarm in Congo's capital Kinshasa as reports suggested some of the gunmen could be Katangan Tigers, a feared group which fought for secession in the south in the 1960s and later fled to former Portuguese colony Angola. --More 2153 Local Time 1853 GMT
