The aid agency reports that medical facilities and warehouses are being raided in the war-torn African country
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has warned that ongoing fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern city of Goma could result in Ebola and other pathogen samples escaping from a laboratory, according to AFP.
ICRC regional director for Africa, Patrick Youssef, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday that the laboratory of the national biomedical research institute in the Central African nation is facing the risk of power cuts.
He said the organization is “very concerned about the situation” in the lab, warning of “unimaginable consequences if the [samples], including the Ebola virus, that it contains were to spread.”
Goma, the capital of the North Kivu Province, has apparently become a battleground after M23 rebels announced on Monday that they had captured the city following weeks of heavy fighting against DR Congo soldiers and UN peacekeepers.
Eastern DR Congo has been plagued by violence for decades, as dozens of armed groups, including the allegedly Rwanda-backed M23 militia, compete with the government for resources such as gold and diamonds.
UN officials said nearly 6.5 million people have been displaced, and hospitals are overwhelmed with the influx of injured patients. Reuters cited aid agencies as reporting that dead bodies littered the streets of Goma, as gunfire racked the troubled city on Tuesday. Protesters attacked a UN compound and embassies, including those of Rwanda, France, and the US, in the capital, Kinshasa, denouncing alleged foreign interference. South Africa announced on Tuesday that four more of its peacekeeping troops in the former Belgian colony had been killed in the clashes, bringing the total number of Pretoria’s losses to 13. Uruguay and Malawi have also lost soldiers in the escalating hostilities.
The ICRC and the World Food Programme said their warehouses had been looted.
“We are extremely concerned about the deteriorating situation in and around the city of Goma. We condemn the looting of our medical warehouse in Goma when the care and survival of the wounded we support depends on it,” ICRC’s African director wrote on X.
Russia has repeatedly raised the alarm over the alleged transfer of unfinished illegal military-biological projects from Ukraine to Africa by the US. The former chief of Moscow’s Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Protection Troops, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, has accused Washington of using several countries, including the DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Uganda, as testing grounds for dangerous pathogens and experimental medical treatments. He was murdered along with his assistant in Moscow last month.
