"Every citizen in the world knows how committed South Africa is to peace in the DRC," said Billy Masethla, a security adviser to the South African president.

On Monday Mai-Mai Operational Commander Lambert Konga Kanape told AFP that for more than a month containers painted in the UN colours and containing heavy arms had been arriving in Kindu, the Maniema provincial capital, from South Africa via Kigali.

"Besides the containers, men in military uniform and speaking English -- who might be mercenaries -- are training soldiers of the RCD (the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy) to use these weapons," he charged.

South African troops serving with the UN force in the DRC, known as MONUC, are currently deployed in Kindu.

"These are utter lies. The people here are soldiers under the United Nations," Masethla, who was in Kinshasa, told AFP in South Africa by telephone.

"This man's imagination has taken him too far. This is maliciousness of the highest order. His claims are sensational and unfair.

"I will meet with him later and I will ask him for hard facts. If he can produce one shred of evidence that any South African soldier is involved in irregular arms supplies I will get that person into prison tomorrow."

An AFP reporter who was in Kindu earlier this month, witnessed a South African military flight offloading cargo destined for the South African MONUC contingent at Basoko base, about two kilometres (a mile) outside the town.

A couple of RCD soldiers were also spotted carrying South African-made R4 automatic rifles, but according to experts in South Africa these rifles were part of a shipment of arms delivered to Rwanda in the late 1980s by the apartheid government.

The only whites seen by the AFP reporter who visited Kindu were soldiers of the South African MONUC contingent, wearing uniforms with UN patches and South African flags, and UN staff.

Kanape charged that "South Africa wants a bigger and bigger part in MONUC, especially in the eastern regions that are coveted by Rwanda."

He called for "an inquiry by the international community to find out who these men are -- mercenaries or South African soldiers -- and what they are preparing.

"Otherwise I will order my men to attack these positions and seize the arms," he warned.

Earlier this year Pretoria facilitated a historic peace deal between warring parties in the DRC, but reports of renewed fighting in the east of the country have put a damper on developments.

The DRC war broke out in August 1998, and at its height drew in more than half a dozen African countries. It is estimated that the conflict claimed some 2.5 million lives directly or indirectly through disease or starvation.

WAR.WIRE