Twelve people were killed by stray gunfire in Kinshasa Monday in violence surrounding the city's central prison, police in the Democratic Republic of Congo said.
Police spokesman Col. Pierrot Mwanamputu said four of the sect members and eight others had been killed by stray bullets, Voice of America reported.
Gunfire was reportedly heard in a number of Kinshasa neighborhoods early Monday.
Two more people were killed in related violence in Matadi in Southwestern Congo.
Police blamed the violence on a separatist sect, Bundu dia Mayala, members of which stormed Kinshasa's main prison, freeing their leader and scores of others in May.
Growing unrest in the country has raised fears of a return to civil war, which ravaged the DRC for nearly a decade beginning in the late 1990s, leading to the deaths of millions of people

Source: Mena