Two United Nations foreign experts have been kidnapped in the central Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN and Congolese sources said Monday, AFP reports.
According to a statement by the DRC government one of the victims was Michael Sharp, an American, and the other Zaida Catalan, a Swede.
Speaking to AFP, the government spokesman Lambert Mende said that four Congolese nationals- three motorcycle –taxi drivers and an interpreter were also taken hostage to a forest by unknown assailants.
Spokesman for the MONUSCO peacekeeping mission, Charles-Antoine Bambara, said on Monday the two went missing on Sunday.
Sharp and Catalan were among a UN panel of experts investigating conflicts that have simmered in DRC since the mid-1990s.
The United Nations has nearly 19,000 troops deployed in the DR Congo, its largest and costliest peacekeeping mission, AFP reports.
About 100 of those troops were recently dispatched to the Kasai region.
