ARBIL, June 12: Clashes erupted in Mosul on Thursday as several hundred former members of the Iraqi army demanding their salaries tried to storm a government building in the northern Iraqi town, witnesses said.

A Kurdish official said initial reports indicated three demonstrators were killed by local police, but there was no definitive casualty toll.

US helicopters circled overhead as the ex-soldiers traded fire with local police, the witnesses said on arrival in this Kurdish city southeast of Mosul.

They said they saw ambulances rushing to the scene to ferry the wounded, including two members of the local police force.

According to the witnesses, the local Mosul administration has started disbursing April salaries to civil servants, but refused to pay members of the former army, which was dissolved by the US-led forces.

The soldiers tried to force their way into the administration building but local police prevented them, triggering fistfights and stone-throwing which degenerated into an exchange of fire, they said.

US forces occupying the region intervened and one American vehicle was torched, said Jalal Khorsheed, a Mosul resident.

An official from one of the two main Kurdish parties in northern Iraq later said US troops and local police arrested more than 150 demonstrators before the violence was contained.

Sadi Ahmad Pire of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said there were reports that three of the demonstrators had been killed and one wounded in the clashes with police.

Pire, the PUK official in charge of Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, blamed the unrest on “elements from the Baath party and ex-intelligence services” trying to create trouble in the town.

The demonstrators torched rooms in the administration building and vehicles outside, said Pire, reached by telephone from Dubai.

The head of the US-led occupation administration in Iraq, Paul Bremer, visited Mosul on May 18 and met town officials installed in US-run elections on May 5.

The election in the multi-ethnic town has been seen as a showpiece of coalition efforts to establish democracy in Iraq and Bremer held talks with new mayor Ghanim al-Basso as well as other council members.

But even as Bremer hailed Mosul as “a great example of embryonic democracy,” former Iraqi army officers demanding backpay and Arab villagers displaced by Kurds returning to their homes demonstrated outside the council building.

Councillor Hunain al-Qaddo said the Baath party remained a major challenge for the coalition in Iraq’s main northern city whose population of around 1.5 million is a mix of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrian Christians. —AFP