FBIS4-48788 "drafr103_e_94008"
FBIS-AFR-94-103 Daily Report 25 May 1994
WEST AFRICA Liberia

Faction Members' Deaths Stir Collaboration Fears

Faction Members' Deaths Stir Collaboration Fears AB2505214094 Paris AFP in English 1455 GMT 25 May 94 AB2505214094 Paris AFP English BFN [Text] Monrovia, 25 May (AFP) -- Four members of two Liberian armed factions were killed and 12 civilians injured when the lorry they were riding on ran over a mine north of the port town of Buchanan, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday [25 May]. Those killed were a colonel of the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and three guerrillas in a recently emerged faction, the Liberian Peace Council (LPC), ministry spokesman Arthur Dennis said. The presence of an AFL general staff officer in the company of LPC fighters has stirred up new suspicions that the AFL helped form the new armed movement last September in a bid indirectly to pursue a conflict with Liberia's main armed faction, the National Patriotic Front (NPFL). But Dennis said "it is not the AFL that sent (the colonel) to the territory. He went to the LPC-controlled area on his own." The LPC, which currently controls the region on Liberia's central coastline where the truck hit the mine, has declared that the NPFL is its avowed enemy. It is not a party to a peace pact signed in July last year among the NPFL, the AFL and a third faction, the United Liberation Movement (ULIMO). Dennis said that 10 of the civilians travelling with the fighters when the mine blast occurred Sunday had been taken to hospital in serious condition.