Nairobi/Kinshasa - The Democratic Republic of Congo has accused Rwanda of planning to attack the eastern Congolese town of Goma in support of Tutsi rebels, reports said Thursday.

The UN-backed Radio Okapi said that Atoki Ileka, DR Congo's ambassador to the United Nations, late Wednesday called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to ward off the alleged impending attack.

Rebel Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda last week said he planned to expand his rebellion from the east of the DR Congo to encompass the entire sprawling Central African nation.

While the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo MONUC could not confirm the claims of Rwandan aggression, it said that there were troop movements near the border.

"There are many rumours. We have observed some concentrations of troops in border areas between Rwanda and DR Congo," Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, MONUC's military spokesman, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) and other groups in January signed to peace accords designed to end sporadic clashes that occurred in 2007, four years after the war in the DRC officially ended.

However, the CNDP and government soldiers have been involved in repeated firefights in the eastern North and South Kivu provinces since late August.

Dietrich said that fighting had intensified this week after a quiet period, with the CNDP seizing the headquarters of an army brigade at Rumangabo, about 40km from Goma, on Wednesday evening.

"During this attack they (the rebels) seized some heavy weaponry from the government," he said. "Yesterday was quite serious because of the number of forces involved and of the casualties."

Aid agencies say an estimated 100,000 civilians have fled the renewed fighting.

Nkunda's troops have until now confined their operations to the east of the nation, which borders Rwanda, purportedly to protect Tutsis from armed Hutu groups.

Many of the Hutus fled to DR Congo after the 1994 massacre in Rwanda, when Hutu militia and military massacred 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the space of a few months.

Aid agencies and observers are concerned that the clashes could reignite a wider conflict and plunge the DRC back into chaos.

Over 5 million people are estimated to have died as a result of the long conflict in the resource-rich Central African nation.

The conflict is often referred to as the African World War due to the large number of different armed forces involved. (dpa)