KINSHASA, Congo — An attack by an ethnic Hutu militia on a village in eastern Congo has left at least 90 people dead, a United Nations official said Thursday.

1. Only on msnbc.com
   1. 
      Updated 76 minutes ago 5/28/2012 4:33:00 PM +00:00 16-year-old sets off buzz over 325-year-old physics
   2. Updated 71 minutes ago 5/28/2012 4:37:27 PM +00:00 Weather chief quits after misappropriation probe
   3. 

      Courtesy Susan Weinger
      Barbecues 'bottom of the list' for moms of fallen troops
   4. 
      'Noah's Ark' built to save frogs in peril
   5. 
      Panel breaks down the 2012 campaign
   6. 

      NBC News
      The beauty in the details: Idaho’s ‘Field of Heroes’

At least 60 of the victims of the attack by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda were civilians, said Nestor Yombo, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

He says the attack was on Saturday and Sunday in the village of Ekingi, around 900 miles northeast of Kinshasa, Congo's capital.

The Hutu militia is made-up in part of fighters from the Hutu ethnic group accused of taking part in neighboring Rwanda's 1994 genocide against that country's Tutsi minority.

Earlier this year, the Congolese and Rwandan armies launched a joint operation to try to flush the Hutu militia out of the hills of eastern Congo where they took refuge in the late 1990s — but the operation has had disastrous consequences for civilians.

Although large numbers of Hutu fighters have turned themselves in, the remaining members of the militia have led increasingly violent reprisal attacks against locals.

Despite successful democratic elections three years ago, Congo — a vast country the size of Western Europe — has struggled to contain the cycle of violence that continues to wrack its lawless east.