China official says police held for protester deaths

BEIJING, Mar 7 (Reuters) Some police officials have been detained for not following orders properly after shooting and killing protesters in China's southern Guangdong province in December, the provincial governor said today.

At least three people died and eight were wounded in Guangdong's Dongzhou village when police shot villagers protesting against a lack of compensation for land lost to a wind power plant, the government said.

Villagers put the number of dead as high as 20.

''At the scene, some police did not follow orders properly, leading to mistaken firings and mistaken deaths,'' governor Huang Huahua told a news conference on the sidelines of the annual meeting of China's parliament.

''Their supervisors have detained these people for investigation, '' Huang said without elaborating.

Shanwei deputy police chief Wu Xing had been sacked and placed under ''criminal detention'' over the shooting, Hong Kong's Beijing-owned Wen Wei Po newspaper reported, quoting the city's Communist Party organisation department director Jiang Haiying. She did not give further details.

Governor Huang stuck by the official line that the unrest was caused by a small group of lawbreakers. ''They misled the unwitting masses,'' Huang said.

China is grappling with growing social unrest, fuelled by disputes over land rights, corruption and a growing gap between rich and poor. Maintaining stability in the face of breakneck change is a theme of this year's parliament session.

The nearly 3,000 delegates to the largely ceremonial National People's Congress are meeting for their 10-day annual session to discuss and approve policies set in place by the ruling Communist Party.

In his speech to the opening session on Sunday, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to better handle ''public order disturbances'' of which the Ministry of Public Security said there were 87,000 last year.

Residents of Dongzhou said it was the armed police, a paramilitary unit, that opened fire, but a government official said this week they were regular police and they were acting in self-defence against villagers armed with pipe bombs.

Government officials say the building of the wind farm is going ahead and that residents have now been properly compensated, though some local people dispute this.

REUTERS SY RN1545