At around 10:00 a.m. on Feb. 22, seven men, some armed, stepped onto a road in eastern Congo and forced two cars belonging to the United Nations World Food Programme to stop.
Several minutes of heavy gunfire alerted a group of conservation rangers guarding workers on the scrubby slope above.
The attackers left the road with their captives and walked up the open hillside straight towards the rangers, well known as the country’s best-trained fighters.
When the group was around 100 metres away, the rangers fired warning shots, sparking a three-minute skirmish. The attackers fled, leaving Italy’s…
