Rogue bullet sends U.N. envoys to Rwanda by bus
GOMA, Congo, June 8 (Reuters) - Top U.N. ambassadors were forced to hitch a bus ride from Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda on Sunday after a security guard accidentally shot a hole in their plane, a U.N. spokesman said.
The Security Council ambassadors had been visiting violent eastern Congo during a trip to promote peacekeeping operations and other efforts to end some of the most intractable conflicts in Africa.
"They were boarding the aircraft to come back to Kinshasa. U.N. security have to surrender their weapons on the plane. He (a guard) was doing a safety check and there was an accidental discharge," said Kemal Saiki, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, the world body's biggest.
"The crew thought that something may have been damaged so they decided not to fly," Saiki said.
The envoys and journalists accompanying them were instead travelling by bus across the border to Rwanda, where their plane would pick them up, he said.
The plane the envoys flew in to Kinshasa was too big to land safely in Goma in eastern Congo since lava from a volcanic eruption a few years ago cut the runway short.
The Security Council envoys' Africa visit, which has become an annual fixture in recent years, is often plagued by organisational hitches and last minute itinerary changes as the diplomats try to cram in visits to the continent's worst trouble spots.
Chadian President Idriss Deby failed to show for a scheduled meeting on Friday to discuss his feud with neighbouring Sudan which has endangered aid operations helping hundreds of thousands of refugees in and around Sudan's Darfur region. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com) (Reporting by Joe Bavier; writing by Alistair Thomson, editing by Mary Gabriel)
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