Inter-ethnic violence broke out in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Monday, local sources said, after two people were killed on the fringes of protests against civilian massacres in the region.

Two civilians from the Kumu people were killed overnight in Goma, mayor Juvenal Ndabereye told AFP. The capital of North Kivu province, Goma sits on DR Congo's border with Rwanda.

North Kivu governor Carly Nzanzu told reporters the violence had broken out on the outskirts of Goma when a motorcyclist was killed during the night.

An AFP correspondent saw two bloody corpses on the ground and burnt-out homes in the outlying Majengo district, where most of the violence took place.

Governor Nzanzu called for calm among the province's young people and said he would sign a decree stopping "all demonstrations, including those labelled peaceful" until further notice.

The Kumu accuse the Nande people of being responsible for the two deaths because they have been behind a 10-day series of protests against the mass killings of civilians in the region.

Lucha (Struggle for Change), one of the civil society groups that backed the protests, said it "denounces violence between civilians".

The Nande people, mostly traders and farmers, have been among the victims of massacres that have left 6,000 dead in the Beni district of North Kivu according to the Catholic Church.

The Kumu are another of the region's ethnic groups.

Civil society groups pushed for demonstrations to pressure the UN's MONUSCO peacekeeping mission over its failure to stop the civilian massacres.

Recent mass killings have been laid at the feet of the ADF militia, a Ugandan Muslim armed group responsible for 1,840 deaths since April 2017 according to the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), an NGO that monitors violence in the DRC's east.

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