Gunmen killed a Bangladeshi peacekeeper in the restive Central African Republic on the same day that two Moroccan soldiers died in a separate attack, the country's UN mission said Friday. The Bangladeshi peacekeeper was killed in the north-west of the country in Bokayai on Tuesday when "the convoy he was travelling in was returning from a patrol in the region" and came under attack, MINUSCA said in a statement.
"The convoy of Bangladeshi peacekeepers... came under fire from around 50 attackers. The driver of the vehicle was fatally shot in the head. The Bangladeshi soldiers responded to the attack." On Wednesday, MINUSCA had revealed that two Moroccan peacekeepers were killed in a separate attack the day before in the remoter south-east of the country as their convoy was escorting fuel trucks.
Two other soldiers were injured in that incident before "the attackers fled into the bush", MINUSCA said. Landlocked and chronically poor, Central Africa is struggling to emerge from a brutal civil war that erupted in 2013 following the overthrow of former president Francois Bozize, a Christian, by Muslim rebels from the Seleka coalition. The 12,500-strong MINUSCA peacekeeping mission was deployed in December that year under the aegis of the African Union and with the support of France, the former colonial power. France officially ended its CAR mission in October but militias are still flourishing and terrorising the population.
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