Pygmies fleeing fighting in the jungles of the Congo have accused rebels of eating their relatives in an upsurge of atrocities engulfing the country's northeast, an aid agency has said.
Several hundred pygmies have joined a growing tide of refugees uprooted by fighting in the past few months, emerging from their forest homes for the first time with stories of killings and cannibalism by bands of gunmen.
"Some of them were killed, some of them saw the rebels eating other pygmies," said Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, head of mission with the Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) aid agency in the northeastern Congolese town of Beni.
Terrified by rebel atrocities, a group of about 200 to 300 pygmies have sought shelter in churches or schools in the village of Mangina, some 25 miles north of Beni, swapping their diet of berries for handouts from aid agencies.
"This is the first time they've had to flee out of the forest," Rodrigue told Reuters by satellite telephone on Thursday. "It's a level of violence that hasn't happened before."
Residents have accused rebels of raping women in front of their families, roasting their victims alive and forcing prisoners to eat human flesh in a wave of atrocities accompanying the fighting, MSF workers say.
"The other thing we have heard is that some people have been forced to eat pieces of members of their family that were killed by the rebels," Rodrigue said.
It is unclear exactly why the rebels would want to eat pygmies, but residents speculate that they might consider them sub-human, and roast them like animals, or believe that eating their flesh might give them magic powers.
The leader of one of the larger rebel factions operating in the area was not immediately available for comment when Reuters called his satellite telephone.
MSF said there was a risk of disease in Mangina, which is sheltering some 35,000 people who have fled fighting in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past few months.
The aid agency says about 155,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in a zone around Beni, where rival rebel factions have clashed repeatedly despite a December peace deal designed to end the war in the former Zaire.
United Nations human rights investigators working in Beni were attempting to confirm reports of various violations in the area including cannibalism and mass graves, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Mission in Congo told Reuters in Kinshasa.
The latest reports of atrocities are just part of a history of bloodshed in northeastern Congo, among the areas worst-affected by the war in the Congo, which has killed an estimated two million people, mainly through hunger and disease.
The area has been plagued for several years by clashes between various factions, often along ethnic lines, which human rights groups say have killed thousands of people.
Congo's warring parties signed a deal in December to share power and reunify the vast country that has been divided since war broke out in August 1998, sucking in many foreign armies.
Many foreign soldiers have pulled out, but local militia violence has surged in the vacuum they left behind.