"Major General Kazini will be taken to a war college for further studies," army spokesman Major Shaban Bantariza told AFP.

Kazini was replaced by Brigadier Aronda Nyakayirima, who has been commanding forces deployed in northern Uganda to fight rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and promoted immediately to major general.

"It is part of efforts to modernize the army," he added.

A statement from State House later said that Museveni had also effected changes in other security agencies.

He dropped the chief of his para-military Internal Security Organisation (ISO) spy agency, Brigadier Henry Tumukunde, and replaced him with his deputy, Elly Kayanja.

Museveni also appointed Colonel Peter Kerim to a newly created post of Deputy Director General of ISO, in charge of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) affairs.

Kerim was part of the command of the Ugandan troops in the DRC.

An UN-appointed team of experts accused 54 people -- including more than 20 senior military and political officials in Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and the DRC itself -- of leading "elite networks" that exploited the DRC's minerals, timber and wildlife during the war in the vast country, which broke out in

The report recommended imposing sanctions on them and financial restrictions on 29 companies, four based in Belgium, which it said were helping to run what it called a "multi-billion-dollar corporate theft."

A Ugandan judicial commission that probed allegations by a team of UN experts that Ugandan officials were involved in the plunder of natural resources in the DRC named Kazini as one of the beneficiaries of the looting.

The government promised to act on the report and take action, but Friday's announcement of changes avoided mentioning Kazini's involvement in the DRC plunder as the reason for his sacking.

It only said that Kazini, along with Tumukunde, would both go for "advanced training at the military war college, in line with the policy of professionalising and modernizing the army."

WAR.WIRE