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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government vowed Tuesday that weekend attacks on the capital Kinshasa would not be allowed to derail the country's peace process or fledgling democracy.

The "unfortunate events of the weekend", when assailants launched simultaneous pre-dawn assaults on four key military installations in Kinshasa, were "isolated incidents" and would "in no way stop the process that is under way," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

A transition government was sworn in last June, two months after President Joseph Kabila enacted a pact to end five years of war.

The interim government is tasked with preparing the country for elections by June 2005.

The DRC's transition "is irreversible and will continue until it achieves its goal of holding elections", the foreign ministry statement said.

It also denounced the "destabilising impulses of some splinter groups", without naming them.

Most accusations over Sunday's attacks, widely seen as a failed coup bid, have pointed to former soldiers from the disbanded army of the late Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, many of whom fled across the Congo River to Brazzaville, capital of the Congo Republic, when Laurent Kabila, father of the current DRC leader, ousted the dictator in 1997.

A DRC police officer said he saw the assailants disembark from boats from Brazzaville, and on Monday, DRC government spokesman Vital Kamerhe said on UN-sponsored Radio Okapi that preliminary investigations suggested that the assailants were former members of Mobutu's presidential guard.

But in a statement released Tuesday in Brazzaville, the ex-Mobutu troops reacted angrily to the accusations.

"It would appear that the unrest ... was caused by some ex-FAZ (Zairean Armed Forces). We are disgusted with the ease with which all ex-FAZ have been accused of having some sort of responsibility in the attacks," said the statement, from a group calling itself the Military Diaspora of ex-FAZ and Congolese Armed Forces from the DRC.

"We strongly condemn the recent acts of some diehard ex-FAZ who have tarnished our good image," it said.

"It is urgent and imperative that others stop confusing us with these elements who think of nothing but making trouble and who only see their future through their past."

That prompted a sharp response from the Brazzaville government, which said it has launched a probe into Mobutu's soldiers because they had admitted in their statement that some of their number were behind the unrest in Kinshasa.

"We believe that the accusations made by the grouping called the Military Diaspora of ex-FAZ and Congolese Armed Forces from the DRC are, by their nature, likely to endanger the fraternal relations between our country and the DRC," spokesman Alain Akouala said.

Brazzaville would be "uncompromising towards the ex-FAZ" if the probe implicates them, said Akouala, without specifying what steps could be taken against the soldiers.

Some former Mobutu soldiers returned to the DRC after a peace pact was signed in April 2003 following lengthy talks in South Africa to end a five-year war that began as a rebellion to oust Laurent Kabila.

Brazzaville has refused to force the soldiers to return home, preferring to allow them to choose if and when to do so.

The foreign ministry in Kinshasa held back from accusing any "foreign country" of involvement in the unrest.

"Contrary to some allegations, the government refrains at this stage in the inquiry from accusing any foreign country of involvement," it said.

Two DRC government soldiers were killed in the fighting at the weekend, while casualties on the assailants' side were unknown as of Tuesday.

Twenty people have been arrested and another 18 managed to escape, according to the DRC authorities.

Kinshasa has been relatively free of violence since the DRC's war ended last year.

The conflict was dubbed "Africa's world war", drawing in six other nations from the continent at its height. Around 2.5 million people died in the war, either directly in combat or through disease and hunger - Sapa-AFP.

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