Three protesters were killed in the tense capital of the Central African Republic on Monday when U.N. peacekeepers opened fire on a crowd amid a resurgence of deadly violence in the country.

Three died and seven were injured by gunfire, a hospital source said, as a crowd of several hundred headed for the presidency to demand the resignation of interim leader Catherine Samba Panza after the deaths of at least 20 people in Bangui at the weekend.

Flimsy tents and filthy corrugated iron huts dot the landscape at M'Poko, the refugee camp at Bangui airport where French troops allegedly raped hungry children in exchange for food.

Many children in the desolate camp -- home to more than 100,000 during the bloodiest days of the crisis in the the Central African Republic last year -- were orphans, forced to fend for themselves for food and water.

Armed men kidnapped a female U.N. employee in the capital of the strife-torn Central African Republic on Tuesday, a day after two aid workers were seized, said a source with the U.N. force.

The gunmen, who appeared to be linked to the mainly Christian militia known as the anti-balaka, seized the woman from a van taking U.N. staffers to work in Bangui, the source with the U.N.'s Minusca force in the country said on condition of anonymity.

Recent violence between rival militia groups has claimed at least six lives at Bambari in the center of the highly unstable Central African Republic, police said Friday.

"Five people were killed and several injured between Tuesday and Wednesday in clashes that erupted in Bambari between two anti-balaka ("anti-machete") groups for reasons not yet known. The victims were, for the most part, anti-balaka," a police source told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

At least 28 people have died and dozens have been injured in the latest clashes between rival militias in the Central African Republic, which was ravaged by a months-long sectarian bloodbath, police said Thursday.

The fighting in the diamond-rich but dirt poor former French colony pitted the so-called "anti-balaka" militia formed by the Christian majority against mainly Muslim Seleka rebels who led a March 2013 coup, a police official said.

The Central African Republic's presidency on Wednesday said "negative forces" were trying to destabilize the interim government after fresh violence claimed four lives overnight.

"Heavy and light weapons were handed out to people, especially to youths, to sow terror in the land and call for the resignation of the transitional President (Catherine Samba Panza)," the president's office said in a statement.

A top U.N. official on Tuesday condemned the use of children in sectarian violence that engulfed the Central African Republic's capital last week, driving 6,500 people from their homes.

Claire Bourgeois, the U.N. humanitarian chief in the strife-torn country, urged militia leaders in Bangui to stop using and targeting children after at least three were killed in the latest clashes that also left a U.N. peacekeeper dead.

The Red Cross said Thursday fresh violence in the Central African Republic was preventing its work to help civilians, especially with its aid workers threatened by gunmen.

"Without security, we cannot do our work and save lives," said Jean-Francois Sangsue, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross's operations in the capital Bangui.

Around 80 people are missing in Central African Republic after their boat sank last week on the M'poko River south of the capital Bangui, the government said on Wednesday.

The U.N. Security Council condemned "in the strongest terms" Friday a recent spate of attacks in the Central African Republic capital, urging an immediate end to the bloodshed.

In a unanimous statement, the 15-member panel demanded that "all militias and armed groups and elements put aside their arms, cease all forms of violence and destabilizing activities immediately in order to end the cycle of violence and retaliation."