BENI — The Congolese health ministry confirmed an Ebola case in Goma late Sunday, marking the first time the virus has reached the city of more than 2 million people along the border with Rwanda since the epidemic began nearly a year ago.

The health ministry said the man who had arrived earlier Sunday in the regional capital had been quickly transported to an Ebola treatment center. Authorities said they had tracked down all the passengers on the bus the man took to Goma from Butembo, one of the towns hardest hit by the disease.

“Because of the speed with which the patient was identified and isolated, and the identification of all the other bus passengers coming from Butembo, the risk of it spreading in the rest of the city of Goma is small,” the health ministry said in a statement.

The virus has killed more than 1,600 people in Congo and two others who returned home across the border to neighboring Uganda. Health experts have long feared that it could make its way to Goma, which is located on the Rwandan border.

The health ministries in Congo’s neighbors have been preparing for months for the possibility of cases, and frontline health workers already have been vaccinated.

The confirmed case announced late Sunday in eastern Congo involves a pastor who became ill last Tuesday. He then left Butembo on a bus, and arrived at a health center Sunday showing symptoms of Ebola, the health ministry said.

Violent attacks against health workers and treatment facilities have greatly compromised efforts to combat the epidemic in Butembo.

Eastern Congo is home to a myriad of armed groups, and Mai Mai militia fighters are active near the hardest hit towns. Health teams have been unable to access violent areas to vaccinate people at risk of infection and to bring infected patients into isolation.

Other times the violence against health teams has come from residents who do not want their loved ones taken to treatment centers or buried in accordance with guidelines aimed at reducing Ebola transmission.

While the experimental vaccine is believed to have saved countless lives, not all Congolese people have accepted it. Some falsely believe that the vaccine is what is making people sick, in part because people can still develop the disease after getting the shot if they already had been infected.

Story: Krista Larson. Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa, Congo contributed to this report.

PARIS — France’s annual Bastille Day celebration became a showcase for European defense cooperation Sunday as other national leaders joined President Emmanuel Macron in Paris to inspect the troops marching in the country’s annual military parade.

Flags of the 10 European countries that are in a joint military pact spearheaded by Macron last year led contingents of French and foreign armed forces from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Elysees avenue.

France has had a Bastille Day parade since 1880, and it’s customary for a foreign leader to be the guest of honor. The guest of honor in 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump, came away so impressed by the spectacle he ordered a military parade in Washington for America’s independence day celebration.

In Paris, the focus this year was the European Defense Initiative, a coalition formed last year to prepare for possible military action outside of NATO.

The heads of state of Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands and Finland watched from the ceremonial viewing stand as 4,000 military personnel, 69 military airplanes and 39 helicopters passed by or overhead.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the invitation to celebrate France’s national holiday “is a symbol for an intensified European cooperation” and “a big gesture toward European defense policy.”

The biggest crowd-pleaser, though, was the man who rocketed through the air on a flying hoverboard. The inventor, former jet-skiing champion Franky Zapata, held a rifle as he zoomed over the parade route on a Flyboard.

Tensions were high on the streets of Paris following eight months of anti-Macron demonstrations by the so-called yellow vest movement seeking more financial help for French workers.

Several hundred yellow vest activists — without their trademark fluorescent emergency jackets — gathered on the margins of the parade.

Television images showed police grabbing one of the movement’s leaders, Eric Drouet, as he stood peacefully on the sidelines and escorting him away.

Later in the day, riot police squads and groups of young people scuffled amid security barricades along the parade route. Officers fired tear gas to clear the streets after some people set trash cans on fire.

VATICAN CITY — The tombs of two 19th-century German princesses were pried open at a tiny Holy See cemetery Thursday and turned out to be completely empty, dashing any expectations they held the remains of a teenager who vanished in 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment.

Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance is one of Italy’s most enduring mysteries, and the opening of the tombs at her family’s request was the latest search for possible leads to fail. Instead, the gravesite inspections raised only new questions: what happened to the remains of the two princesses who were buried in the side-by-side tombs in 1836 and 1840, respectively, in peaceful Teutonic Holy Field near St. Peter’s Basilica?

“The tombs are empty. We are all amazed,” Orlandi family lawyer Laura Sgro told reporters. It was Sgro who had received an anonymous letter suggesting the family check out the tomb in the cemetery where a stone angel holds a scroll reading in Latin “Rest in peace.”

Witnessing the tomb’s opening along with Sgro, and a technical expert for the Orlandi family was also Pietro Orlandi, whose 15-year-old sister disappeared after she went to her music lesson in Rome on June 22, 1983. The siblings’ father worked as a messenger for the Vatican, and the family lived in Vatican City State.

The Vatican said in a statement that the opening of the tombs “yielded a negative outcome. No human remains nor funereal urns were found.”

It said the inspection of Princess Sophie von Hohenlohe’s tomb turned up an underground chamber measuring roughly 4 by 3.7 meters (13 by 12 feet) that was “completely empty.” Then the stone lid of an adjacent sarcophagus of Princess Charlotte Federica di Mecklenburg was removed and inside “no human remains were found,” the Vatican said.

It added that relatives of the two princesses were informed that the tombs of their loved ones were empty.

A Holy See spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, said the Vatican is combing through documentation about two structural projects that involved the cemetery area, one in the late 1800s, and the other between the 1960s and 1970s, in case that work might explain why the princesses’ remains weren’t there.

The Vatican had announced it had engaged a forensic anthropology expert, who is a professor of forensic medicine at a Rome university, to examine the remains and prepare them for DNA testing. But that arrangement proved premature when no remains were found.

Pietro Orlandi said that in a certain sense that no bones were found was “personally a relief,” since it would have been upsetting to view remains that might have been those of his sister.

Speculation has swirled around Orlandi’s fate for years. Conspiracy theories have abounded, including perhaps she was kidnapped as a part of a failed bid for the release of the Turkish gunman who shot and severely wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in 1981.

Last year, two set of remains were found during renovations in the basement of a building on the grounds of the Vatican’s embassy in Rome. Scientific testing ruled out that the remains were Orlandi’s.

Story: Frances D’Emilio. Trisha Thomas contributed to this report.