DHAKA: A deadly clash kills Five Chinese civilians and two Vietnamese border guards on late Friday during a shootout between Vietnamese border guards and Chinese citizens, reports The New York Times.

The daily said that the incident happened when Chinese citizens were trying to enter Vietnam illegally, according to Vietnamese official.

The gunfight began after the guards had detained 16 Chinese around previous day noon and were holding them inside a border post to return to the Chinese authorities, the reports said.

The detainees then grabbed one or more AK-47 assault rifles from the guards and at some point began firing, it added.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Friday night on its official microblog that a violent incident had taken place on the Vietnamese border but did not give details.

An online report from Vietnam citing the newspaper Tien Phong, which is state-run, said hundreds of police officers and border guards surrounded the building during the confrontation and urged the Chinese inside to surrender.

Some of the five Chinese who died committed suicide, while the others were shot dead by Vietnamese police officers and border guards, according to an English-language report on the website of Thanh Nien Daily, which is published by the Vietnam National Youth Foundation, an official organization. The report also said three women in the group “armed themselves with knives.” Another report said some or all of those who killed themselves did so by leaping from the multistory building.

The Chinese group was made up of 10 men, four women and two children. They were detained at the Bac Phong Sinh border crossing in Vietnam’s northern Quang Ninh Province, which borders Guangxi Province in China. Chinese border guards had informed the Vietnamese at 5:30 a.m. Friday that a group from China was trying to enter Vietnam illegally, the Thanh Nien Daily report said.

The newspaper’s website posted a photograph of Vietnamese guards in green uniforms standing beside the four women and two children. The women are all wearing scarves over their faces, a typical style of dress for some Muslim women in China, particularly in areas of the region of Xinjiang, where ethnic Uighurs, who generally practice Sunni Islam, are a significant population. In the photograph, the faces of the two children are visible, and their facial features indicate they could be Uighurs.

BDST: 1459 HRS, APR 19, 2014