A Canadian child was killed yesterday as Cambodian troops and police stormed a school in the northwest resort town of Siem Reap to end a six-hour hostage crisis, a diplomatic source said. ?We have been informed by the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior that a Canadian is dead,? an embassy official told Reuters. He gave no further details, but Cambodian police chief General Hok Lundy told reporters the child was a Canadian boy about 5 years old.

Masked gunmen stormed into a school in the Cambodian town of Siem Reap near Angkor Wat yesterday and took 29 kindergarten pupils hostage, many of them children of expatriate hotel workers.

A resident, who said she had seen a list of the children held, told Reuters the hostages were American, Irish, British, Australian, Singaporean, Canadian, Korean, Japanese, Swiss, Indondesian, Indian, Italian and Filipino.

Soldiers and police sealed off the area around the Siem Reap International School while officials negotiated with six gunmen said by diplomats to be demanding up to $ 30,000 and a 12-seater van to make their escape. ?The hostage-takers are demanding money, cars and weapons. We are still negotiating with them but no solution has been reached,? provincial deputy police chief Ung told Reuters.

The Thai Foreign Ministry said it knew nothing about reports the gunmen had demanded free passage across the Thai border 100 km (60 miles) away. ?We have not been contacted by the Cambodian authorities about any request by the gunmen to escape into Thailand. I don't want to speculate on whether we will oblige their request until we know the situation,? spokesman Sihasak Phuanketkeow said. Governments around the world were making frantic efforts to establish whether any of their citizens were among the children being held.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said two Australian children had been released but one was still being held, while a diplomat in Phnom Penh said at least one British child was among the hostages. In Tokyo, the Foreign Ministry said it was still checking whether any Japanese children were still in the school. ?We're concerned about the children generally. We're anxious about the safety of the children and we hope they will be released soon,? Downer told reporters in Canberra.

Hostage-taking, normally for money, is not uncommon in the war-scarred southeast Asian nation, which is still awash with weapons after decades of civil war, including the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s. More than 1 million tourists went to Cambodia last year, most of them visiting the famed 800-year-old Angkor Wat temple complex on the outskirts of Siem Reap.