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| - Two policemen and two sect members were killed during clashes with a religious movement in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, police said. The Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) or "Kingdom of the Kongo" movement seeks to restore a 15th century Congolese kingdom inside pre-colonial boundaries compromising parts of modern-day DR Congo, the Republic of Congo, Angola and Gabon. Clashes broke out after about a hundred cult members in the town of Kisantu, about 130 kilometres (80 miles) from the capital Kinshasa, attacked the homes of people from outside the province and demanded they leave. "In Monday's clashes in Kisantu, two police officers were brutally killed. Two BDK members also died," a local police official told AFP. "Six police officers are seriously injured and two supporters of this movement, a man and a woman, have been captured," the official said. Ne Muanda Nsemi, the group's spiritual leader, was accused by the government of former president Joseph Kabila of staging deadly attacks on state institutions between the end of 2016 and early 2017. On March 30 of this year, several dozen of his supporters defied a ban on the assembly of more than 20 people imposed by authorities because of the COVID-19 pandemic, disrupting traffic on a busy street in Kinshasa. Congolese police dispersed them with tear gas. Dozens of armed groups and militias operate in the DR Congo, many in the east of the country, a legacy of the two Congo wars in the 1990s that dragged in the country's neighbours Uganda and Rwanda. grn-bmb/st/pma/dl
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