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KIGALI, June 28 (AFP) - The Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) has disputed UN claims that 150 people were killed by its rebels during a "mutiny" in Kisangani in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last month.

The town's radio station was overrun in the early hours of May 14, in what the RCD said was a mutiny by one of its splinter groups but later slammed as a bid by President Joseph Kabila's government and a rival rebel movement, the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC), to take over the city, the DRC's third largest.

The RCD has claimed only 41 people were killed in what it described as an "attempted mutiny"

But Asma Jahangir, the UN's special rapporteur, told reporters in Geneva after a five-day fact-finding mission to the former Zaire that at least 150 people were killed.

"I would not dispute the figure of 150. I think that is a minimum figure that you can take," she said.

"These killings were done, I believe, by the authorities of RCD-Goma," she added, referring to the Rwandan-backed movement which controls the eastern third of the DRC, including Kisangani.

RCD secretary general Azarias Ruberwa hit out at her findings, declaring: "We dispute these far-fetched conclusions, for two reasons.

"We have held our own inquiry with eminent professional jurists who established that 41 people were killed," Ruberwa told Nampa-AFP by telephone from Goma, the RCD's headquarters in the east of the former Zaire.

He added: "Mrs. Jahangir spent only two days in Kisangani, how can you carry out an independent and serious inquiry into such grave allegations in two days?"

Calling on the United Nations to conduct an on-the-spot fact-finding mission lasting at least two weeks, Ruberwa said: "The main responsibility for these deaths lies not with the RCD but the Kinshasa government which connived with the mutineers. If this mutiny had not taken place no one would have died."

Jahangir, who visited the eastern DRC cities of Kisangani and Goma plus the capital Kinshasa on her fact-finding mission last week, said witnesses told her that a message had been broadcast on local radio in Kisangani on May 14, urging people to "kill Rwandans".

A crowd that included civilians, members of the police force, and the mutinous rebels who had invaded the radio station then went on the rampage and lynched six people, the witnesses told her.

Troops dispatched by RCD officials from Goma to Kisangani carried out summary executions around the city, targeting civilians as well as mutinous police and rebels.

Jahangir dismissed the report issued last week by the RCD after the rebel group had commissioned its own inquiry into the unrest saying that 41 people were killed in the violence, and exonerating the rebel movement of any responsibility. - Nampa-AFP

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