Banda Aceh – Clashes in Indonesia's oil-rich province of Aceh have killed at least 12 people including five suspected separatist rebels, and endangered food supplies to residents, officials said Tuesday.

Guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) said they had attacked an outpost of US oil giant ExxonMobil in retaliation for violence directed at locals by security forces.

Aceh police spokesman Commissioner Sudarsono said five suspected GAM members died in a gunfight in the village of Panca, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of here on Monday. But local GAM spokesman Ayah Sofyan told AFP that only one rebel had been killed and the four other victims were civilians "brutally shot dead by troops."

Sofyan said the bodies could not be retrieved yet as the military was barring access to the area. Humanitarian workers in Banda Aceh confirmed the ban on entering the area.

On Monday, villagers found seven bodies at three separate locations in Central Aceh, district spokesman Zulkifli Rahmat told AFP. Three of the bodies had gunshot wounds and the others were already decomposed. "The seven bodies have already been buried by local residents," Rahmat said, adding that the killers were unknown.

Unknown men on Monday night torched some 130 houses and shops in Lampahan in Central Aceh, most of them owned by ethnic Acehnese, Rahman said. The area is about one kilometer from the headquarters of an army battalion and an elite police unit.

More than 1,200 people took temporary refuge at the main mosque and a school in Lampahan, a subdistrict town.

Violence in Central Aceh in the past week has halted the supply of food and fuel from the neighbouring districts of North Aceh and Bireun, Rahmat added.

Drivers of supply trucks were afraid to travel the road, fearing ambushes, he said. "If in another week, no supplies of essential foodstuffs arrive in Central Aceh, then the 250,000 people in the district may suffer from famine," he said. The shortage has already caused prices to rise drastically in the district, Rahmat said.

Electricity supplies to the district have already been disrupted for lack of fuel, and Central Aceh now has to rely on limited supplies from North Aceh.

The North Aceh GAM spokesman, Teungku Jamaica, said rebels attacked a security outpost within the Cluster IV area of the closed-off ExxonMobil gas operation in Lhoksukon on Monday. "We fired grenades, mortars and gunshots in retaliation for the actions of security personnel who have continuously roughed up the local population around ExxonMobil," Jamaica said. But the police spokesman said the attack consisted only of "one or two shots" and added there were no casualties.

The government, which is losing 100 million dollars a month in lost liquefied natural gas exports, is pushing ExxonMobil to reopen its facilities closed due to the violence since March 9.

More than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Aceh this year in violence involving the separatist rebels and security forces.