Five UN peacekeepers die in Sierra Leone blast

CHRISTO JOHNSON

FREETOWN, JANUARY 7: Five United Nations peacekeepers from Zambia were killed and 13 others wounded in Sierra Leone when a box of mortar shells they were moving accidentally blew up, UN officials said on Sunday. The shells had been turned over to the UN mission in the West African nation on Saturday as part of a drive to disarm fighters from a decade-long civil war, a spokeswoman for the force said.

‘‘It appears it was just a tragic accident,’’ she said, adding that weapons handed in were sometimes old and dangerous. ‘‘A lot of these things have deteriorated,’’ she said. ‘‘Disarmament is a very dangerous process, especially for the people who are handling the weapons.’’ The explosion occurred on Saturday in eastern Sierra Leone as a battalion of Zambian peacekeepers was taking the mortar shells to a UN arms depot, she said.

The wounded were taken to hospital in the capital Freetown. ‘‘Five died, three are injured, and the other 10 are responding to treatment,’’ she said, adding there were fears for the lives of the three seriously injured.

Zambia lost two Army colonels on the Sierra Leone mission in November when their helicopter plunged into the Atlantic, also killing four Ukrainian crew and a UN worker from Bulgaria.

The force in Sierra Leone — the UN’s largest at over 14,000 people — said on Saturday it had succeeded in disarming all but a few stragglers in its drive to end more than 10 years of civil war pitting Revolutionary United Front rebels against government forces and private militias. More than 42,000 fighters had handed in their arms ahead of Saturday’s deadline for the disarmament drive to wrap up, UN officials in Freetown said.

The operation’s final stages were taking place in the eastern diamond centre of Tongo field, where fighting broke out in late December over diamond mining, forcing the United Nations to postpone its official conclusion until Saturday.

UN officials hope the remaining fighters will hand in their weapons in the next few days, and rebel leaders are expected to lay down their arms symbolically, although there are still believed to be many arms circulating. The war was long fuelled by the rebels’ sale of diamonds for arms, and Sierra Leone and Liberia are both under UN embargoes on black-market diamond exports. (Reuters)