Up to 36 reported killed in Amazon land protest

Indians protesting oil and gas exploration on their lands battled police in Peru's Amazon on Friday, with authorities and Indian leaders separately reporting 11 police and 25 protester deaths. Initial accounts of the clashes and death tolls varied with independent journalists having little access to the remote jungle highway in the northern Peruvian province of Utcubamba where the fighting took place. The violence erupted before dawn as officers broke up a road blockade by some 5,000 Indians in an area called Curva del Diablo _ or ``Devil's Curve.'' Protest leaders said police opened fire from helicopters with bullets and tear gas, while national police director Jose Sanchez Farfan said protesters attacked officers with firearms. He said they also set fire to government buildings. Cabinet chief Yehude Simon said that 11 police officers were killed _ some with spears _ and 109 people were injured. He said three Indians were killed in the clashes. ``One can't say that the natives were the victims,'' Simon told a news conference late Friday. Farfan said at one point a group of six to eight policemen was surrounded on a hill by thousands of indigenous protesters who killed them and threw their bodies off the hilltop. But protest leaders said 25 Indians, including three children, were killed in the clashes, accusing the government of ``genocide'' in attacking what they called a peaceful protest. Another 50 Indians were injured, 14 of them seriously, said Servando Puerta, one indigenous leader. The central government's public ombudsman's office said it could only confirm the deaths of five Red Indians. President Alan Garcia, who wants to ramp up foreign oil investment in the Amazon, accused the main Indian leader Alberto Pizango of ``falling to a criminal level: to assault a police post, grab arms from police, kill police who are fulfilling their duty.'' Pizango denied that Indians killed police, saying the protesters were unarmed. He called for international human rights groups to intervene.