Riot police patrolled a southern Chinese township where tension prevailed yesterday nearly a week after demonstrations over land compensation were ended by police opening fire on protesters. China has confirmed police shot dead three people ?in alarm? during an attack on Tuesday on a wind power plant in the Guangdong province township of Dongzhoukeng. Newspaper reports said the official who ordered the shooting had been detained. Two farmers said yesterday five protesters, in their 20s and 30s, had been killed and many had been injured and were hiding at home, fearful of going to hospital. Another resident said about 20 men were still missing from the village.

?They were all good people,? one of the farmers said on the outskirts of the sandy township where one of the few signs of life was riot police streaming off buses and taking up position. China has seen a series of bloody protests pitting residents against local officials over the issue of land rights as breakneck development swallows up farmland and compensation is watered down due to corruption. But the Dongzhoukeng riots, over compensation for land lost to a wind power plant, marked a level of violence rarely seen.

Human rights group Amnesty International said it was thought to be the first time Chinese police had fired on protesters since the military crushed the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. Estimates from residents and rights groups had put the number of dead between two and as many as 20. ?I was scared to death,? said a farmer?s wife called Li. ?I can still remember the sound ? pow, pow, pow.? The government acknowledged the demonstrations were put down violently, but said that was because riot police were being attacked. ?Over 170 armed villagers led by instigators ... used knives, steel spears, sticks, dynamite powder, bottles filled with petroleum, and fishing detonators,? the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

<B>Chris BUCKLEY </B>