WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- A militia spokesman said Wednesday that his forces on a stolen police gunboat fired on a rival rebel group in the Solomon Islands and killed 100 people, a figure called an exaggeration by New Zealand's foreign minister.
Rebel spokesman Andrew Nori said he received the information from colleagues who fired a machine gun from the gunboat directly into a crowd of people. Nori said there had been about 300 to 400 armed men on the beach."There were no civilians," he told The Associated Press. "They were all carrying weapons. They were not holding a picnic."
Solomon Islands spokesman Alfred Maesulia could not confirm any deaths. "It's true there was a shooting incident, and there might well have been casualties," he said.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff, who has been monitoring the situation in the tiny South Pacific nation, said Nori's claim appeared to contain "a significant level of exaggeration."
The gunboat attack marked a major escalation in the dispute between the rival islanders, who had been fighting for 18 months with crude weaponry.
Nori speaks for migrants from the nearby island of Malaita who have been fighting indigenous Istabu rebels, trying to push them off the main island of Guadalcanal. The Solomons are 1,600 miles northeast of Sydney, Australia.
Nori's group, called the Malaita Eagle Force, set off the latest troubles on Monday by seizing the prime minister at gunpoint and demanding his resignation.
Information on the crisis has been difficult to verify. Flights into the Solomon Islands have been canceled and phone service has been sporadic.
At least 50 people have been killed or left missing in recent fighting and 20,000 forced to flee their homes.
New Zealand officials said earlier today that firing from the gunboat had hit a Catholic school. A Catholic worker in the capital, Honiara, said students were believed to be on holiday.
Earlier today, the rebels who had captured Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu (pronounced oo'-loo-faa'-loo) dropped their demands that he resign.
Ulufa'alu's political fate will be determined in a parliamentary session June 15, where he will face a vote of no confidence, according to a joint statement signed and released by the government and Nori.
Ulufa'alu will no longer be followed by armed rebel guards, with normal police providing his security and he "is at liberty to move out of and into his residence and offices at will," the joint statement said.
However, Goff said today that armed Malaitan militants still surround the prime minister's house.
A Solomon Islands government official reached by phone in the capital said on Tuesday that rival bands of rebels were fighting both east and west of town -- with the Malaitan side much better armed after joining forces with paramilitary teams on Monday and seizing machine guns and ammunition from the Solomon Islands' armory.
A reported 1,000 people were involved in a shootout Tuesday near the island's international airport, six miles east of Honiara.
Two British members of the European Parliament said gunmen strafed their chartered plane as it tried to take off from the airport. Nobody was injured.
"When we taxied down the runway there was a tremendous fusillade of shots at us," said John Corrie, who went to the islands with his colleague Glenys Kinnock to serve as mediators.
The gunfire damaged the plane, forcing the aircraft to return to the terminal. It successfully took off on its second attempt, said Corrie, who spent most of his time trapped inside his hotel room.
The Malaita Eagle Force now controls the airport.