Villagers in the remote hills of northeastern Congo said armed groups had killed at least 15 people and kidnapped 34 in recent attacks, the United Nations said on Sunday, adding that hundreds of homes had been razed. The reports underlined the chaos reigning in the lawless east of Africa's third largest country, where a civil war officially declared over in 2003 killed nearly four million people, mainly from hunger and disease. The attacks were reported around Tche, a string of hamlets some 60 km (37 miles) northeast of Bunia in the Ituri province. U.N. troops flew over the region on Saturday and saw 220 burnt homes and smoke rising from nearby hills, U.N. spokesman Christophe Boulierac said. "We saw homes that had been burnt and looted ... We saw a single body. We spoke with the people who were there and some of them told us that 15 people had been killed in recent days," Boulierac said from Bunia. "They gave us the names of the victims and they told us where they had been buried," he said. The U.N. peacekeepers, who travelled to Tche to investigate reports of a massacre, had not yet verified the information. Boulierac said witnesses also said 34 people had been kidnapped. --More 2251 Local Time 1951 GMT
