Nearby Congolese soldiers had received warnings of the attack in the morning. But the soldiers did not arrive until late in the evening, long after the killings were over.
It happened before dawn on Tuesday 3 March, as a dozen rangers at Upemba national park headquarters were being briefed by their commander before the day’s routine anti-poaching patrol. At 5.40am machine-gun fire began to rattle out of the surrounding darkness.
As many as 80 heavily armed fighters had crept in through the protected grasslands in south-east Democratic Republic of the Congo and encircled Lusinga, the park headquarters perched on a steep grassy ridge.
The few rangers scrambled to defend the base. But within half an hour, the attackers had overwhelmed them. They looted weapons and munitions, chanted war songs, and searched door-to-door for the targets on their kill list.
Seven people were killed during the mayhem, including five civilians, among them young Congolese conservationists and motorbike drivers.
“We tried to fight back, but they dominated us,” says Innocent Mburanumwe, Upemba’s deputy director, who was in the briefing room when the attack began. “It was horrible.”
Upemba is a haven for threatened species, home to the DRC’s last herd of wild zebras. Some of the last remaining elephants in southern DRC also roam the 1.3m-hectare (3.2m-acre) park, which is larger than Lebanon.
The park had become a rare conservation success story in DRC, which remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries for wildlife defenders. In recent years, it raised funding to recruit new rangers, and animal populations decimated by poaching began to recover.
Upemba’s 256 rangers, many close to retirement age, are trained to tackle poachers, not militia groups. Although the park had received warnings, there was little preparation for the size of the assault on 3 March.
According to accounts from attack survivors and those involved in the emergency response, the assailants were divided into two groups.
Disparate fighters, probably drawn from a local pro-independence militia, Bakata Katanga, made up the larger group. They were unruly: drunk or high, with some wielding bows and arrows and machetes.
But a smaller group of about 20 men appeared highly trained. Dressed in black fatigues, they were equipped with radios, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
“They had very precise instructions,” says Maxime Devolder, a Belgian working on park development programmes, who said the commandos told him they had orders not to harm foreigners.
Their orders were to kill the rangers, as well as anyone from Kasai, the home region of the DRC president, Félix Tshisekedi, and many of his supporters.
While the foreigners were reassured, even given bottles of water, one was used as a human shield by the fighters as they went door-to-door around the barracks.
One of the first people to be killed was Dr Ruth Osodu, a 28-year-old vet who had joined the park in 2024 to work on monitoring animal populations. The fighters mistook her for a Kasaian, although she was born in Lubumbashi, the capital of the southern Haut-Katanga province.
“She’s someone who gave her life to protect the richness of Congo,” says her uncle, François Kitoko. Osodu was from a family of eight children, and had already succeeded beyond all expectations. He added that her parents were inconsolable.
Other park members killed for unclear reasons included Subira Bonhomme, the head of the planning department and a father of two. A motorbike driver from eastern DRC was hacked to death.
In footage of the attack posted on social media, militiamen can be seen looting houses and shouting, while two members of park staff lie on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs.
Devolder says the commandos knew exactly where the munitions were held and were asking for the park director, Christine Lain.
He described how staff kept their heads and even tried to deceive the attackers to save lives. At one point, when staff were asked where a specific person was, they spontaneously pointed to the body of Bonhomme, who had just been killed.
At about 8am, the commandos allowed some of the foreigners, and several Congolese staff members, to leave Lusinga in a jeep.
For about a dozen others, including Lain, who had removed a panel from the ceiling in the briefing room and hidden in a small roof space during the attack, the ordeal continued. They emerged in the afternoon, when they heard park rangers calling out for survivors.
The rangers led the staff to a hillside and gave them drinks. But they scarcely had time to rest before a squad of untrained militia fighters careered back into Lusinga in a jeep and began shooting.
The civilian staff, including Lain, scattered into the bush. “We were running and running and there were bullets all around,” she says. They hiked through the night – walking through streams to cover their tracks – before reaching the safety of a village the next morning.
Exactly who organised the attack remains unclear. Three days later, an unknown group, Mouvement Debout Katanga pour la libération du Congo (MDKC), claimed responsibility. It said it was fighting what it called the “tyranny”’ and “corruption” of Tshisekedi’s rule.
There are fears that the violence may be linked to the conflict with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels in eastern DRC. According to the survivors’ accounts, some of the commandos spoke variants of Swahili common in eastern DRC, and in other east African countries. One of them spoke only English or Swahili, unusual in a country where French is the official language.
DRC’s government announced on 13 March that the Bakata Katanga militia was “likely linked” to the M23 rebels. This remains unconfirmed and the M23 has not commented.
In a statement, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) condemned the attack: “Across the world, rangers and protected area staff work at the forefront of conserving biodiversity and protecting ecosystems that are vital for all of humanity. Too often, they do so at great personal risk. The events at Upemba national park are a stark reminder of the dangers faced by those who dedicate their lives to protecting nature.”
For Upemba, the focus is now on rebuilding, with the safety of staff in an increasingly dangerous area the pressing issue. “We have to start again from scratch,” says Lain, who is already back in Lusinga. “We keep going.”
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