PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – U.N. troops fought the bloodiest clash of their 10-month-old mission in Haiti on Sunday, when a raid to remove ex-soldiers from a police station erupted into a gunbattle that killed three people, including a peacekeeper, officials said. Three peacekeepers were also wounded.

The Sri Lankan peacekeeper who died in the raid in Petit-Goave, an stronghold for former soldiers about 45 miles west of Port-au-Prince, is the first killed in a clash since the United Nations force arrived, said Toussaint Kongo-Doudou, a U.N. spokesman. Two ex-soldiers died and 10 others were wounded.

The U.N. troops entered Petit-Goave before dawn. Using a loudspeaker, the Brazilian commander of U.N. troops in Haiti, Lt. Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, tried for 20 minutes to get the former soldiers to surrender peacefully when they opened fire on U.N. troops, Kongo-Doudou said.

“We wanted to resolve this peacefully, but our troops received a hostile response from the insurgents and so they responded with force,” he said.

Afterward, U.N. troops moved in on the building and removed at least one fallen peacekeeper on a stretcher, he said.

The clash was the first major confrontation between the 7,400-strong U.N. force and former members of Haiti’s disbanded army, who helped oust former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a 1991 coup and again in an armed rebellion a year ago.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, has been in turmoil for years.

A U.S.-led peacekeeping force was deployed after Aristide was forced into exile in February 2004, and this force was replaced by the U.N. peacekeepers in June. But armed rebels and former soldiers still control much of Haiti’s countryside and the peacekeepers have been criticized for failing to curb violence.

U.N. forces detained 35 ex-soldiers following Sunday’s gunbattle, Kongo-Doudou said.

“We are now in control of the police station,” U.N. civilian police spokesman Jean-Francios Vezina said.

The soldiers, many well into their 50s with fading uniforms and aging rifles, have bucked calls by the interim government and the U.N. force to disarm.

Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, four years after he was ousted. The 1991-1994 coup regime is blamed for the murders, maimings and torture of thousands of Aristide supporters, and today’s former soldiers include convicted murderers.

The government plans to pay $29 million to about 6,000 former soldiers. There are no official estimates on how many took up arms last year, but estimates range from several hundred to 2,000.