KAMPALA, Mar 13 - Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army rebel chief Joseph Kony is believed to have fled into the troubled Sudanese region of Darfur, President Yoweri Museveni told reporters Friday.

"About one month ago Kony himself disappeared. Our military said that the small group in which Kony was had disappeared into Darfur. That is what they told me," Museveni said.

The fugitive LRA leader has been on the run since December 2008 when regional states launched a hunt to nab him after he refused to sign a peace deal with Kampala.

Since the operation, remnant LRA fighters have been moving in the jungles of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, south Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR).

Asked whether he was confident that Sudanese forces were not providing Kony with a safe haven, Museveni said: "If the Sudanese want to accommodate him in Darfur, that makes no difference to us."

"It makes no difference because they supported him much more in the past but whatever they gave him, we captured," he added.

He said that the rebel group, notorious for abducting children and mutilating its victims, had planned a raid in its former stronghold in northern Uganda before the 2008 military operation.

"We intercepted them and decimated them," he said. "There is no possibility of Kony coming to Uganda, or south Sudan, or CAR, or even Congo so long as we are allowed to operate there."

Museveni also said that he believed there were three LRA factions -- one headed by Kony, another led by Dominic Ongwen, who along with Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court, and a third group whose leadership structure is unclear.