Banda Aceh – Seven people were killed in Indonesia's troubled Aceh province, three of them when government troops retook a town held for 14 hours by rebels, police and residents said Saturday.

Two fishermen and an unidentified man were killed, apparently in the crossfire, when the troops retook Idi Rayeuk, a town of some 15,000 people in East Aceh on Friday.

Free Aceh Movement (GAM) rebels had held the town from Thursday evening until early Friday morning without incident, said Sulaiman, a resident of Idi Rayeuk.

"The two fishermen shot were certainly not GAM members. It isn't clear when the two were killed, but their bodies were found after the shooting when the troops came in," he said.

Three other people, two of them women, were wounded in the fight to regain control of the town, he said. Police sources said only one person was wounded in the action.

Nearer to the province capital three unidintied bodies were found Saturday. The body of one unknown man bearing torture marks was found in the grounds of the Syiahkuala University seven kilometers from Banda Aceh.

The two other bodies, those of a man and a woman with their heads crushed, were found in Lam Teuba in the greater Aceh area Saturday afternoon, police and witnesses said.

According to residents, Idi Rayeuk township was peaceful during the rebel occupation, but when the government reinforcements arrived after dawn it turned into a battlefield with gunfire on all sides.

"During the GAM occupation, hundreds of flags were flown along a four-kilometer stretch of the main Medan-Banda Aceh highway, between Tanoh Anoe and Teupin Batee villages," one eye-witness said. "During that time, the security forces stayed holed up in the commando headquarters [in the town]," he said.

During the GAM occupation a police dormitory and a jail, both empty, were burned to the ground, residents said, and the main Medan-Banda Aceh highway running through the area blocked with felled tree trunks. By Friday night however, the town was firmly back in government hands.

Police operations spokesman Chief Commissioner Kusbini Imbar told journalists in Banda Aceh late Friday that GAM had burned down eight police barracks in Idi Rayeu.

The local GAM spokesman, Ishak Daudm, said his troops had taken the action because men wearing military uniform had been harrassing the population of the town.

Meanwhile a youth was shot dead by security forces during a sweeping operation in Cot Baroh, in the district of Pidie Friday night, a resident there said.

GAM, which has been fighting Jakarta rule since the mid-1970s, entered into talks with the government last year in Geneva, the results of which have been consecutive shaky truce periods.

But the death toll has continued to mount, with some 200 killed in the violence so far this year.

The two sides remain politically far apart, with the GAM demanding independence, and Jakarta saying it will grant only limited autonomy.