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At least one police officer and one protester have been killed as thousands of people took to the streets in nationwide protests against incumbent President Joseph Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The deaths occurred in the eastern city of Goma yesterday, according to Jose Maria Aranaz, director of the UN’s Congo-based Joint Human Rights Office. Two others were injured by gunfire, he said.

In the capital Kinshasa, security forces fired tear gas and charged at several thousand stone-throwing protesters.

Police said although the Kinshasa demonstration had permission from the authorities unlike other parts of the country, the crowds had deviated from an agreed route.

“In these cases we don’t negotiate, we disperse,” national police spokesman colonel Pierre Rombaut Mwanamputu told the AFP news agency Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa, reporting from Lubumbashi, said the situation developed in a different way in that city.

“Opposition supporters said they were waiting for their leaders to come out to say ‘start marching’ [without a permit] but the leaders didn’t come out so people did not start marching,” she said.

“Some people said they were afraid to do so because in the past few weeks when the police clashed with the opposition supporters some of them were injured.”

Opposition groups called for the protests after the country’s Constitutional Court ruled earlier this month that Kabila, in power since his father’s assassination in 2001, could remain in a caretaker capacity beyond the expiry of his second term in December.- AFP.