At least 26 combatants and an unconfirmed number of bystanders were killed in a gunbattle between warring tribes in Papua New Guinea (PNG), police said yesterday.
A tribe, their allies and mercenaries were on their way to attack a neighboring tribe when they were ambushed on Sunday in Enga province in the South Pacific nation’s remote highlands, Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary Acting Superintendent George Kakas said.
PNG Police Commissioner David Manning later described the clash as a “gunbattle between warring tribes.”
Photo: AFP
An unconfirmed number of villagers were also killed.
Police reinforcements were sent to the scene of the battle, he said.
“At this point, it’s not clear exactly how far we have moved into the conflict there,” Manning told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “But the intent is to regain control or have a significant presence in that conflict area and then work ... our way through our procedures in dealing with this type of incident.”
Kakas initially said 53 combatants had died, but security forces later revised the death toll down to 26.
Bodies were collected from the battlefield, roads and the riverside, then loaded onto police trucks and taken to the hospital.
Authorities were still counting “those who were shot, injured and ran off into the bushes,” Kakas said.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape said he had “great concern” about the violence in Enga and urged the warring tribes to lay down their weapons.
“If there are community disputes, there are ways to deal with the community disputes,” Marape said.
“Lay down your arms. A lot of disputes will be resolved. One killing or two killings doesn’t solve the problem. It contributes towards more problems,” he added.
John Luther, a leader of Akom village whose warriors were among those ambushed, talked down the prospect of an escalation of the violence in retaliation for the deaths.
“We’ve lost a lot of lives. I don’t feel we should be able be to retaliate. We’re already weak in numbers,” Luther said. “I don’t think I would allow my people to go fighting again.”
The villagers were ambushed from a school building while on a mission to avenge the death of a woman killed in a neighboring allied village, he said.
Luther also accused the military of aiding and arming his enemies in the ambush. He had been told the death toll was 44.
However, PNG government lawyer Oliver Nobetau said he expects more lives would be lost in retaliatory violence.
“There’s a big concern that this will continue on. Revenge killings tend to be a normal thing that happens,” said Nobetau, who is on temporary assignment to the Sydney-based international policy think tank Lowy Institute.
He said that although tribal violence is common, it has never happened on this scale and that police have limited resources to cope.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS