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.