In an incident on Sunday in the town of Kisangani in the northeast of the country, the soldier was killed by police and the army as they tried to arrest him for attempted rape, the deputy police chief of Tshopo province, Colonel Gerard Bosange told AFP.

"On Sunday, a sergeant shot two soldiers and a civilian who had been sent to arrest him after killing a father who had tried to stop him raping his daughter," Bosange said.

"On the orders of the government in Kinshasa, the police and the army used a mortar to kill the soldier, who had two combat weapons and five loaded clips and refused to hand over the body of the victim."

On August 11, a soldier shot dead two officers trying to stop him from bundling his wife into a military vehicle in Beni, a restless region in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the army regularly clashes with armed groups.