Another LRA commander killed

Sep 15, 2009

THE army said on Monday it had killed a notorious senior rebel commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in an assault in the Central African Republic.

By Barbara Among

THE army said on Monday it had killed a notorious senior rebel commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Lt. Col. Santos Alit and five others were killed 15km north-east of Obo in the Central African Republic.

Alit was a member of the LRA peace team in the failed Juba Peacetalks.

The army also said it had captured one PK machine-gun with 136 bullets, two shot machine-guns with 18 bullets and two empty magazines.

This comes only two weeks after the army captured Maj. Okot Atiak, a feared senior rebel commander, believed to have lead the massacre of 250 civilians at Atiak in Gulu district in April 1995.

Alit and Okot headed a group which is said to be protecting the elusive LRA leader, Joseph Kony.
“It is evident this was a main force hiding here. We salute all the forces involved in hunting down these terrorists,” said Lt. Col. Felix Kulayigye, the army spokesman.

Felix Kulayigye said Okot provided the army with intelligence for the campaign against the rebels in southeast Central African Republic (CAR).

The army also said it recovered 22 short machine- guns, three laptops, two mobile phones, four accumulator batteries and two pairs of Congolese army uniforms in a separate operation last Saturday.

Also captured were 60 bottles of benzathen medicine, half a dozen of coartem tablets, half a tin of brufen, four packets of endomycin, 11 bottles of expen and four packets of diosper.

A section of UPDF squads remained in the DR Congo to support the Congolese army in the second phase of the operation against the LRA.

It is this group that continues to engage the LRA now held up in parts of DR Congo and southern CAR.

The armies of Uganda, Sudan and the DR Congo have been fighting the LRA in remote south Sudan, northeastern DR Congo and southern CAR since the peacetalks with the Government collapsed last year.

This came after Kony refused to sign a final peace agreement that the Ugandan government said would have given him and his surviving two deputies immunity from prosecution at the International Criminal Court.

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