Rome holds funeral for Italian ambassador killed in DR Congo

ROME: Italy paid its last respects to its ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday, who was killed with his bodyguard and driver during an ambush on a UN convoy.

Luca Attanasio, 43, died after being shot on Monday after unidentified assailants ambushed a two-vehicle convoy from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) in which he was travelling. The group was en route to a school programme in the eastern province of North Kivu, near the Rwanda border.

Attanasio’s bodyguard from Italy’s Carabinieri police forces, Vittorio Iacovacci, 30, was also killed, along with a Congolese WFP driver, Mustapha Milambo, 56. Accompanied by Chopin’s funeral march, the coffins of the two Italians, who were repatriated on Tuesday, were carried by carabinieri into Rome’s Saint Mary of the Angels church for a state funeral.