While the armed groups of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo continue reaping terror, the financial dimension of the pillaging of natural resources, particularly in favour of Uganda and Rwanda, remains the key to their presence and justifies the decision adopted by the Security Council to extend the arms embargo: this is the picture' of the situation in the eastern provinces of ex-Zaire given by Mamadouh Bah, spokesman for the MONUC (United Nations Mission in DR-Congo), presenting a report of UN experts in the capital Kinshasa.

A local official of the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, said on Friday that 12 diamond miners working in a pit 84 km northwest of the town of Punia in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Maniema Province are dead and many others are seriously ill from what appears to be a hemorrhagic fever.

Safter an armed insurgence in Bukavu, the three men arrested on charges of ordering the murder of Pascal Kabungulu Kibembi, 55 years old, human rights activist from Héritiers de la Justice', killed last July 31 in Bukavu.

Three suspects were arrested into the murder of Pascal Kabungulu Kibembi, executive secretary of the Héritiers de la Justice' human rights association, killed in his home early on Sunday July 31 in Bukavu, provincial capital of South Kivu, in the east Democratic Republic of Congo.

Businessmen in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have collected 120 tons of maize flour and other food for 2.5 million hungry people in Niger, a high ranking government official said on Thursday.

Violence in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Katanga Province has been displacing thousands of civilians, according to local media and two international NGOs.

Some 1,000 refugees in camps in Tanzania returned to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) late in July in order to register to vote in the 2006 general elections, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

The UN Mission in Congo, known as MONUC, has called for an inquiry into the killing of Pascal Kabangulu, a prominent Congolese human rights activist, officials at the mission told reporters in Kinshasa on Wednesday.

The Independent Electoral Commission of the Democratic Republic of Congo has said 2.9 million people in Kinshasa, the capital, had signed up to vote in the 2006 elections by the time registration centres closed on Sunday.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 1616 (2005) on Friday which extends an existing two-year arms embargo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for at least one more year.