Briefly

CONGO

Four mountain gorillas fatally shot

KINSHASA — Four mountain gorillas were fatally shot and two went missing in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern North Kivu region, conservationists said yesterday.

The four dead animals were found on Sunday by park rangers 47 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation told Agence France-Presse. Two others went missing the same day.

The mountain gorillas are a main tourist attraction in the Virunga park, where poaching of wildlife is endemic.

NIGERIA

U.S. professor shot, woman kidnapped

YENAGOA — Armed robbers shot a U.S. professor and a security guard in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt yesterday, the latest violent incident in the anarchic oil-producing Niger Delta.

Michael Watts, a Berkeley, Calif.-based analyst on oil-related violence in the delta, was in a hospital with bullet wounds in the hand after a newspaper office he was visiting came under attack, one of his friends said.

The security guard, a Nigerian, was also in a hospital with bullet wounds.

The incident came the morning after suspected ransom-seekers kidnapped the mother of the speaker of the state house of assembly in neighboring Bayelsa state.

ETHIOPIA

Red Cross evicted from Ogaden region

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopian authorities have ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross to pull out of the volatile Ogaden region for reputedly interfering in political issues, officials said yesterday.

The eastern region is also known as Somali and shelters an ethnic Somali rebellion — the Ogaden National Liberation Front — on which the government is trying to keep a lid.

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