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UN p eacekeepers will deploy to another three villages in the strife-torn Ituri province after having set up a permanent presence near the site of a massacre of 65 people, the UN special envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) said yesterday.

"The permanent deployment began Friday" with the dispatch of some 175 troops to Bule, said UN Special Represenative to DRC William Swing.

Bule is 90 km northeast of Bunia, the capital of the northeastern Ituri province where clashes between Lendu and Hema ethnic militias have claimed some 50 000 lives since 1999.

It is also located only five kilometers from Kachele where 65 people, thought to be from the minority Hema tribe, were killed and a score were wounded on October 6.

"We'll finish the first phase of deployment by the end of the week," he told journalists.

UN peacekeepers are due to set up operations at Iga Barrier, 25 km north of Bunia and at Bogoro and Marabo, 25 and 38 km south of Bunia.

Since taking over from a smaller French-led EU force on September 1, the 3 300-strong contingent of troops attached to the existing UN peacekeeping mission in DRC, known as Monuc, has largely stayed in Bunia apart from reconnaissance missions.

An escalation of the violence, which has caused some half a million people to flee their homes, led to the deployment of a French-led EU security force in Bunia in June.

Troops of Monuc's Ituri Brigade, as the new UN force is called are mandated to deploy across Ituri, a region about twice the size of Belgium.

UN peacekeepers were shot at by unknown gunmen Saturday near a village close to Kachele and returned fire, a Monuc spokesperson said yesterday.

No UN peacekeepers were injured in the incident near Petro, the village from which the perpetrators of the massacre are believed to have set off from for Kachele, and they made no arrests. – Sapa-AFP.

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