Gunmen in Congo Attack President’s House

Unidentified gunmen attacked the house of Congo’s president on Sunday afternoon, setting off a short but fierce firefight that killed at least six people, Congolese officials said.
The motive for the attack was not clear, and the assailants were repulsed several hundred yards from the president’s house, said Lambert Mende, information minister for the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We are thinking it might be some kind of urban terrorism,” Mr. Mende said. “I don’t think it was a coup attempt because nobody has claimed it. I think it was more to frighten people.”

According to Mr. Mende, a group of heavily armed attackers clashed with security guards around 2 p.m. at a checkpoint near the residence of President Joseph Kabila. Mr. Mende said Sunday night that police officials were still trying to pinpoint exactly how many attackers were involved.

Mr. Kabila lives in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Kinshasa, the capital. He was home at the time of the attack, Mr. Mende said, and the assailants were armed with machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

After about 15 minutes of fighting, the presidential guard repelled the attackers, killing six, arresting several and chasing away others. Mr. Kabila was never in danger in the attack, Mr. Mende said, which happened at the first of three heavily fortified roadblocks about a half mile from the presidential residence.

Mr. Kabila is “busy working with our personnel to secure the town,” Mr. Mende said Sunday night.

Other people close to Mr. Kabila said the attack might have been intended to feel out the weaknesses of the president’s personal security forces as part of a wider plot to assassinate him.

Congo is no stranger to instability or random violence. For the past 15 years, various parts of the country have been engulfed in civil war or insurrection, and gun battles have broken out on the streets of Kinshasa before. Most of the violence tends to be in the eastern provinces, where myriad armed groups fight one another over Congo’s mineral riches, including gold, copper, tin ore and diamonds.

Civilians, especially women, are often the victims, and United Nations officials call eastern Congo “the rape capital of the world” because hundreds of thousands of women have been raped there in recent years.

Mr. Kabila won a major election in 2006 and faces re-election this year, but his grip on most of the country, which is thickly forested and the size of Western Europe, is considered weak. In early February, gunmen attacked the airport in Lubumbashi, a town in southeastern Congo that had been thought to be relatively stable. The fighting did not last long but seemed to reveal that security there was spotty as well.

On Sunday, Mr. Mende said there was no connection between that attack and the one on the president’s house, calling the Lubumbashi attack a “nonevent” and the result of a local dispute.