MUSLIM CHILDREN TARGETED IN CAR VIOLENCE

    Bangui, 2 Rabi’ul Awwal 1435/4 January 2014 (MINA) – Aid workers of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have said Muslim Children in the Central African Republic have become deliberate targets of armed gangs.

    “More children are being targeted and killed,” an official with the UNICEF confirmed to Al Jazeera quoted by Mi’raj News Agency (MINA) as reporting on Saturday.

    The latest remarks follow a UNICEF statement on December 30 that described attacks against children as having “sunk to a new low”, including cases of beheading and mutilation.

    “Attacks against children have sunk to a vicious new low, with at least two children beheaded, and one of them mutilated, in the violence that has gripped the capital…,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in their December 30 statement.

     Ombretta Pasotti, who coordinates work by the Italian NGO Emergency at the paediatric hospital in Bangui, confirmed to the AFP news agency on Saturday: “Before now, children were collateral victims, but today some of them are targeted directly.”

     “Some children are victims of stray bullets and shell fragments… Some were wounded ‘by chance’, but here we also have children who were shot because they are Muslims,” Pasotti said.

     UNICEF said it had verified 16 killings of children since December 5, while 60 more youths were wounded in clashes that broke out between Muslim former Seleka and the Christian majority fighters.

     UNICEF appealed to sectarian fighters to “halt grave violations against children”, to release those in their ranks and to avoid attacks on health and education workers.

     In just three weeks, some 370,000 people have been displaced to dozens of makeshift camps in an upheaval affecting almost half of Bangui’s population, relief workers said.

      About 100,000 residents have fled to a tent city at the airport, where African and French troops are based.

     The landlocked nation of 4.6 million people has endured a succession of coups, rebellions and mutinies since independence from France in 1960, but the latest strife is the first to take on a dangerous religious dimension, after fighters of the mainly Muslim Seleka coalition seized power in March last year. (T/P09/E1).

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA).