Shoot-Out Between UN, Liberian Gang

By Jonathan Paye-Layleh March 12, 2007

A United Nations patrol exchanged fire with a gang of armed men in northern Liberia over the weekend, killing one member of the group that witnesses said was looting the area, officials and residents said on Monday.

The Sunday shooting occurred by the remote town of Zorzor along the Guinean border - an area that has been seen as a potential threat to stability as the West African country tries to recover after more than a decade of civil war. It is home to legions of unemployed former fighters who cross easily between the two countries.

Ben Malor, a spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, referred to the armed men as "raiders" who had stolen a vehicle, laptop computers and other electronics and were heading toward the Guinea border when they encountered the patrol.
Malor said the armed men first shot into the air - apparently to scare villagers away - then opened fire on a joint patrol of UN peacekeepers and Liberian police. He confirmed that one of the assailants was killed.

Momo Kamara, head of a local development organisation in Zorzor, said three men armed with rifles and pistols broke into his offices and stole money and computers.

Kamara said the body of the dead man was put on display for public viewing on Sunday. He said locals recognised him as a former fighter in Liberia's war who went by the name "General Monkey."

Zorzor is about 250km north of Liberia's capital, Monrovia, in remote Lofa County. The county was where a rebel movement called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD, launched a rebellion in 1999 against then-President Charles Taylor, who had plunged Liberia into fighting with his own uprising 10 years earlier.

Taylor was ousted as part of a 2003 peace deal and is now awaiting trial for war crimes allegedly committed by his forces in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Malor said the Zorzor shooting was the first such gunfight involving UN peacekeepers in Liberia that he could recall since the swearing-in of the postwar government of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2006.