Troops move into the Ambon city main road on Sunday. (AFP)

Ambon (Indonesia), April 25 (Reuters): At least 10 people were killed and nearly 90 wounded today as Muslim and Christian residents of the eastern Indonesian city of Ambon fought pitched street battles, police said.

“The victims are 98 in total, 10 of whom are dead,” Moluccas provincial police chief Brigadier-General Bambang Sutrisno said by telephone.

He did not say how the victims had died. “We are still trying to control the situation.”

A church and a UN office were torched in the clashes as mobs rampaged through a majority Christian area of the provincial capital of the Moluccas province, witnesses said.

Gunfire and explosions could be heard in several parts of the city. It was not clear who was firing and the mobs were using mostly stones and knives.

Thousands of people were killed in the Moluccas during nearly three years of sectarian conflict before a peace deal was agreed in early 2002.

Civil emergency curbs were only lifted last year.

Today’s clashes began after police arrested and then released a number of people for trying to raise the banned flag of a little known and mostly Christian rebel group, the South Moluccas Republic movement.

About 200 police reinforcements are expected to arrive early tomorrow, provincial governor Karel Albert Ralahalu said. The governor, quoted by local radio, said violence was not sectarian but between independence supporters and their opponents.

Jakarta-based El Shinta radio reported two people had been killed.

Novi Pinontuan, editor of the Suara Maluku newspaper in Ambon, said he had seen a church and a local UN coordinating office in flames and that hundreds of people were rampaging through parts of the city. “The office and four UN cars were in flames,” he said.

Caroline Tupamahu, the United Nations Development Programme officer in charge in Ambon, said no staff had been injured and only two local security guards had been at the office.

Residents said police fired shots in the air in an effort to break up the clashes.

Some 85 per cent of Indonesia’s 220 million people are Muslim.

In some eastern areas, however, the Christian and Muslim populations are about equal in size.