The Congolese army on Tuesday clashed for a second day with suspected Ugandan rebels blamed for recent massacres in the country’s volatile east, civil society and UN sources told AFP.

The Congolese army on Tuesday clashed for a second day with suspected Ugandan rebels blamed for recent massacres in the country's volatile east, civil society and UN sources told AFP.

The battles broke out on Monday when troops attacked rebels who were thought to be organizing another possible assault on the large town of Beni in the North Kivu province.

A member of the Beni region's civil society movement told AFP that the latest clashes have killed one army officer and two rebels, according to the military.

Troops of the large UN peacekeeping mission in the country, MONUSCO, were participating in the fighting, a source with the force told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The UN soldiers, boosted by a tough Security Council mandate to take the offensive against armed groups rife in the east, have engaged in "other important (operations) carried out in parallel" with actions alongside the national army, the source said.

Scores of civilians have been killed since the start of October in vicious raids blamed on the rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces and National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF-NALU), who terrorized parts of the resource-rich region for almost two decades.

On Monday, North Kivu's governor Julien Paluku reported "contact" between government soldiers and "the ADF rebels close to the outskirts of Beni town, inside the Virunga National Park," famed for its endangered mountain gorillas.