Greater Noida (Uttar Pradesh), Sept. 15: A mob of retrenched labourers stormed India’s longest golf course on Delhi’s outskirts today, sparking a clash in which a security guard was shot dead.

Eighteen people were injured, including another Jaypee Golf Course guard who took a bullet, in an incident that bore faint echoes of the clash between police and Honda workers at Gurgaon in July.

Company officials claimed the mob was carrying country-made firearms when it burst through the gate and tried to enter the main office. The labourers said they had been called to a meeting by the management ? which company officials deny ? but the guards wouldn’t let them in and began beating them.

Set in Greater Noida, the five-star golf course ? Asia’s third-longest ? is patronised by leading industrialists, CEOs, celebrities, bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians.

The labourers and the Jaypee management had been at loggerheads for a long time, the police said. Trouble started today around 12.30 pm when a crowd of 150 arrived at the gate.

“We asked to be allowed in, but the security guards wouldn’t let us enter,” said Yogender Sharma, a labourer. “The company had called us to a meeting. When we started moving in, the guards started beating us.”

The crowd was too big for the guards, hired from a private agency, and many of the labourers managed to force their way into the main office. Once inside, they went on the rampage, breaking windows and pots, smashing furniture, even dousing the walls with petrol.

The security guards collected their weapons and fired in the air, the police said. Nobody was sure who shot Ravinder Rai, a 58-year-old retired army subedar, or his colleague who is now in hospital.

“The guards allegedly fired to disperse the gardeners, who have been protesting for the past few months and had come to hold talks with management,” said the senior superintendent of police, Noida, Piyush Mordia. “The medical and forensic reports will soon tell us what sort of weapon the bullet was fired from.”

Five security guards and five labourers are in hospital.

The Noida Authority had acquired 452 acres of land and given it to Sterling Resorts for development in 1995. But Sterling failed to fulfil the lease conditions and the contract was cancelled. The Noida Authority re-acquired the land and, in 2000, gave it to Jaypee to develop.

Sterling had hired 170 labourers, who say they later worked for the Noida Authority till Jaypee took over and retrenched them after a short-term contract.