Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was killed on Monday when a UN convoy came under attack in the troubled east, DRC sources and the government in Rome said.

Luca Attanasio died of his wounds after a World Food Programme (WFP) convoy came under fire near Goma while he was on a field trip to the region, a senior diplomatic source said in Kinshasa.

Two other people also died, Major Guillaume Djike, the army’s spokesman in North Kivu province told AFP.

Other sources said those two fatalities were the envoy’s driver and bodyguard, and the WFP said "a number of other passengers” were injured.

Attanasio’s death was confirmed by the Italy’s foreign ministry.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi offered his "deepest condolences”, while President Sergio Mattarella condemned the "cowardly attack”.

"The Italian republic is in mourning for these servants of the state who lost their lives,” Mattarella said in a statement.

And Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio expressed his "great dismay and immense sorrow”, breaking off from a meeting in Brussels with EU counterparts to make an early return to Rome.

"The circumstances of this brutal attack are not yet known and no effort will be spared to shed light on what happened,” Di Maio said, paying tribute to the victims as "two servants of the state”.

Attanasio, 43, had been representing Italy in Kinshasa since 2017, the foreign ministry said. He joined the diplomatic service in 2003 and served previously in Switzerland, Morocco and Nigeria.

The envoy suffered "gunshot wounds to the abdomen” and was taken to a hospital in Goma in critical condition, the diplomat in Kinshasa said.

The DRC’s army said its troops were searching the area for the assailants.

Troubled region 

A vast country the size of continental western Europe, the DRC is grappling with numerous conflicts, especially in its remote, mineral-rich east.

Scores of militias roam the four eastern provinces, many of them a legacy of wars in the 1990s that sucked in countries around central-southern Africa and claimed millions of lives.

According to the Italian foreign ministry, the ambassador and the policeman were with a convoy of MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo.

But WFP confirmed that Attanasio was on a fact-finding mission with the UN’s food agency.

"The delegation was travelling from Goma to visit a WFP school feeding programme in Rutshuru when the incident took place,” it said in a statement.

"The attack... occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts,” it said.

Monday’s attack occurred north of Goma, in Nyiaragongo Territory.

Armed groups in the area include a Rwandan Hutu militia called the FDLR, as well as the M23, also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army.

The region includes the UNESCO-listed Virunga National Park, a vast wildlife reserve that is home to a quarter of the world’s population of critically endangered mountain gorillas.

More than 200 of the park’s rangers have been killed in attacks stretching back more than a decade.

The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, said last week that more than 2,000 civilians were killed in North and South Kivu and Ituri province last year.

Attanasio is the second European ambassador to have been killed while serving in the DRC.

In January 1993, French ambassador Philippe Bernard was killed during riots in Kinshasa sparked by troops opposing Mobutu Sese Seke.