NINETEEN people have been killed in a roadside bomb blast and clashes between soldiers and Tamil Tiger guerrillas across Sri Lanka's northern region, the military said yesterday.

A bus with soldiers was hit by a bomb planted by the rebels in the northern Jaffna peninsula, killing two and wounding seven others. Hours earlier, six Tamil Tigers and three soldiers were killed in a clash in Vavuniya district south of Jaffna, and eight guerrillas were killed in two separate battles.

Insurgents attack Somali government OVER two dozen Somali insurgents have attacked a government base in the capital Mogadishu, setting off a gun battle that killed six people, including two police officers.

The unidentified attackers clashed with policemen in the north-eastern part of the capital, a hotbed of support for an Islamic group that ruled much of southern Somalia for six months last year.

Ex-soldiers riot in northeast China

DEMOBILISED soldiers rioted at a retraining centre in north-eastern China yesterday, the latest in a series of apparently coordinated protests against living conditions.

Armed special forces moved in to stop them, but the clashes worsened when additional demobilised soldiers flocked to the school after hearing a rumour that two ex-soldiers had been killed.

Girls' bodies found by Polish military

POLISH border guards have found the bodies of three Chechen girls near the Ukrainian border after picking up their mother, who had spent days wandering in the mountains after the family entered the country illegally.

Border guards yesterday spotted the emaciated woman carrying her two-year-old daughter near a the foot of the Bieszczady mountains . . . now the European Union's eastern border.

The woman told officials she had left her three dead daughters in the mountains, and pointed them in the right direction.