(Updates with rebel delegation comments from paragraph 3)

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Last-minute disagreements over a peace deal between the Congolese government, Tutsi rebels and Mai Mai militia threatened to scupper efforts to end fighting in the country's east on Tuesday.

Government officials and diplomats said on Monday the warring factions had forged an agreement to declare an immediate ceasefire and a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone, after more than two weeks of talks.

The deal was due to be signed on Tuesday in Goma, capital of violence-ravaged North Kivu province, but Tutsi rebels loyal to renegade General Laurent Nkunda said EU and U.S.-mediated negotiations to find a way out of the impasse had broken down.

"There will be no signing tonight. That I can confirm. We hope that things will advance tomorrow morning," Kambasu Ngeve, the head of Nkunda's delegation, told Reuters late on Tuesday.

The deal had been touted by foreign observers as a major step towards finally ending fighting in the east, where violence has continued despite the official end of a broader 1998-2003 war.

Fighting, disease and malnutrition still kill 45,000 Congolese every month in a turmoil that has claimed 5.4 million victims in nearly a decade, making it the deadliest conflict since World War Two.

The rebels agreed to a text calling for them to lay down their arms and integrate into the national army or demobilise in exchange for the offer of a limited amnesty on Monday. However, the delegation complained on Tuesday that the text of the deal had been changed overnight.

Ngeve said the government's status in the peace deal was no longer clear in the new document.

"We want the government to be engaged as a participant and not as a facilitator," he said.

Vital Kamerhe, the spokesman for the talks and head of Congo's lower house of parliament, told delegates earlier in the day that a solution would be found and the deal would eventually be signed.

"Eighty percent of the document is accepted by everyone ... So I am asking you, ladies and gentlemen, for a bit more patience," he said.

Meanwhile, delegates from PARECO, one of five Mai Mai groups also due to sign the ceasefire agreement, said they had come under attack from Nkunda loyalists on Tuesday morning and threatened to not sign the deal.

"We cannot sign while the other side is in the process of taking ground," PARECO spokesman Theophile Museveni told Reuters.

Fighting between government soldiers, Nkunda's insurgents, Mai Mai, and Rwandan Hutu rebels has driven more than 400,000 North Kivu residents from their homes in the past year, in what has become Congo's latest conflict-driven humanitarian crisis. (Editing by Daniel Flynn and Matthew Jones)

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