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KARACHI, Thursday (Reuters)

Pakistani police said they had killed two suspected al Qaeda members and arrested five others after a three-hour shootoutin the southern city of Karachi in which a young girl was wounded in the crossfire.

A police source said the men were thought to be members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, although provincial police chief Syed Kamal Shah declined to comment, describing the men only as "not ordinary criminals".

Police in Karachi had intensified land and aerial patrols to head off possible attacks on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States, which Washington has blamed on al Qaeda.

Security and intelligence agents raided a three-storey building in an upmarket district of Karachi morning and arrested two men, but had to call in police support after other people in the building threw a grenade at them.

"There was a shootout which lasted over three hours in which six policemen were injured, one of them seriously," Shah told reporters at the scene.

Witnesses said police had fired teargas and thousands of rounds at the building before the gunmen, armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades and sub-machineguns, finally surrendered.

"Two criminals were killed and we have arrested a total of five criminals," Shah said.

But police retracted an earlier statement that a four-year-old girl had been killed in the crossfire.

One officer said the girl had been wounded in the crossfire and had fallen unconscious, only to regain consciousness later at a local hospital.

One detective said the girl lived with her mother in another apartment in the same building, which was newly built and largely unoccupied. The mother and her two-year-old son were unhurt. She was taken into protective police custody as a witness.

One of the arrested men shouted "Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) as he was led away, while another was speaking Arabic, witnesses said. The Kalma, the Muslim declaration of faith, was written in blood on the wall of the apartment's kitchen, a policemen told Reuters.

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