Nine UN peacekeepers were killed in an ambush today while on patrol in northeastern Congo.

The identities of the attackers, who wore no uniforms, are not known. The deaths of the nine Bangladeshi troops is the deadliest assault on UN troops in the six years they have been stationed in the Congo, officials said.

The ambush happened near the town of Kafe, 20 miles northwest of Bunia, capital of Congo’s lawless Ituri province.

The nine men were among 21 Bangladeshis on patrol this morning near a camp housing civilians who have been displaced by persistent fighting in Ituri, said Mamadou Bah, a UN spokesman.

"These blue helmets were out there protecting people, and they got ambushed while doing it," Bah said.

Suspicion fell on militia of Ituri’s Lendu tribe, whose rivalry with the area’s Hema tribe has been fueled by the influx of arms from Congo’s devastating 1998-2002 war and by outsiders vying for Ituri’s mineral wealth.

The attackers hid in the bush and struck quickly, running away immediately after, said Colonel Dominique Demange, head of the roughly 16,000 troops in Congo - the world’s largest peacekeeping deployment.

The United Nations sent an attack helicopter and a transport helicopter with a rapid reaction force, but bad weather limited their effectiveness, he added.

UN peacekeepers are overseeing a transition toward peace in Congo, where the five-year war has killed more than 3 million people, by aid workers’ estimates, mostly through hunger and disease.

About 4,800 UN forces are in Ituri. Since 1999, fighting in the vast northeastern province has killed more than 50,000 and forced 500,000 to flee their homes, human rights groups say.

The fighting is mainly between armed militia of the Hema and Lendu tribes, whose hatred for one another plays out in retaliatory village raids and massacres.

The Ituri conflict came amid Congo’s larger war. During the war, both neighboring Uganda and Rwanda armed the Hema and Lendu militias, mainly to wrest control of the mineral-rich territory. The two sides eventually turned on one another.

In the three years since the conflict ended, a transitional government has struggled to extend its authority to the vast country’s often lawless east.

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