Jakarta – The prospects for peace in troubled Aceh province were unclear Thursday, with a separatist leader denying a report that he had reached a cease-fire agreement with the Indonesian goverment.

President Abdurrahman Wahid said Thursday that Hasan di Tiro, the chief of the rebel Free Aceh Movement, had agreed to end 25 years of fighting that has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past decade alone, the official Antara news agency reported.

"In Geneva, Hasan [di] Tiro held talks with our ambassador. They reached an agreement to stop the fighting," Antara quoted Wahid as saying while on an official visit to the Netherlands.

Di Tiro led a rebellion in Aceh in the 1970s and later fled to Sweden. Speaking by telephone from his home in the Stockholm suburb of Botyrka, di Tiro called the report a "lie" and said there had been no meeting or cease-fire.

"There is no such thing," his spokesman, Bakhtiar Abdullah, said later. The so-called cease-fire has never been formally signed or agreed upon. The meeting never took place."

Abdullah said the rebels would continue fighting until Aceh gained independence. "We will never stop fighting until our objective to free Aceh from the neocolonialist Indonesian regime of Jakarta is achieved," he said. "They are not only killing our commanders, but they are also still rampaging and terrorizing the innocent helpless Acehnese civilians."

Wahid, who is on a whistlestop European tour, has repeatedly said the bloodshed in Aceh would end by March. He made his latest comments to a group of expatriate Indonesians, many of whom settled in the Netherlands after fleeing the authoritarian regime of former President Suharto.

Since assuming office in October, Wahid has offered to hold a referendum on whether staunchly Muslim Aceh should adopt Islamic law. He has also promised Aceh more self-rule and a greater share of revenue generated from the province's oil and gas reserves.

In the latest national budget, however, Aceh failed to deliver on his pledge of more money and has rejected calls for outright independence.

The prospect of a pause in fighting follows months of growing violence in Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island. On Monday, a senior rebel commander, Abdullah Syafi'ie, said his forces would be willing to honor a cease-fire if Indonesia's military made the same commitment.

But on Wednesday security forces opened fire on rebels in northern Aceh, police said. The region's police chief Lt. Col. Syafei Aksal said his officers and an army unit clashed on Wednesday with rebels in Uteuen Bunta village, 1,100 miles northwest of Jakarta.

He said Cmdr. Mukhtar, who had led a local rebel band, was shot to death. Three troops were injured and about 60 houses burned in the clash.

Also on Wednesday in north Aceh, rebels threw grenades into a local government office and a police station in two separate attacks, police said. No one was seriously injured.