UNITA Rebels Reportedly Kill 79 in Angola

In their boldest attack in months, UNITA rebels overran a town near this capital, killing 79 people and interrogating foreign aid workers, officials said Monday.

About 200 rebels attacked Caxito, a town of 50,000 about 40 miles northeast of Luanda, at dawn Saturday, the army said in a statement.

The statement did not provide casualty figures, but an aid official in Luanda who was in contact with colleagues in Caxito said 79 people, including soldiers, police officers and civilians, were killed. The official spoke on condition his name not be used. The dead were all Angolans.

Rebel officers questioned aid workers from the United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Brazil and Hungary, according to the statement.

The foreign aid workers were “very traumatized,” the official said. Their identities were not immediately available. They were working for an Angolan aid group known by its Portuguese initials, ADPP.

The rebels ransacked buildings for food supplies and abducted about 60 people, mostly young men and women from a school.

In the statement, UNITA said it killed 37 soldiers and police officers in the attack.

The fighting reportedly forced thousands to flee toward the crumbling coastal capital.

The war has driven an estimated 3.8 million people--about one-third of the population--from their homes, causing a humanitarian crisis.

The attack cast new doubt on recent indications that the foes were ready to discuss a peaceful end to the civil war that first began after the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal.

President Jose Eduardo dos Santos said last week that he was ready to examine recent peace overtures from UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi had indicated that he was ready to return to the implementation of a peace deal brokered by the United Nations in 1994. The accord collapsed in 1998.

The government and the United Nations have blamed UNITA--a Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola--for the breakdown.