The 30 New People's Army guerrillas, mostly armed with machine guns, fled in four vans with the freed inmates after the late-Saturday jail attack in Quezon province. They later clashed with police at a checkpoint, wounding two policemen and two civilians, Quezon police chief Fidel Posadas said.

The rebels, some of whom were believed wounded in the gunbattle at the police checkpoint, escaped with the free prisoners toward a forested mountain and were being pursued by soldiers and policemen backed by air force helicopter gunships, Mr Posadas said.

The Quezon provincial jail warden and his deputy have been sacked by local officials for security lapses that allowed the rebels to easily enter the prison, which has hundreds of prisoners, Mr Posadas said.

About 25 of the prison's 50 guards and the deputy warden were in Manila for a seminar, considerably weakening the provincial jail's defenses at the time of the attack, Mr Posadas said.

'The guards would not have been overwhelmed if they did not open the gates just like that when the disguised rebels appeared to seek custody of some inmates,' Posadas told The Associated Press by telephone.

The 5,000-strong Maoist rebels have been waging a communist rebellion in the country's rural regions for nearly 40 years. They have escalated their attacks against government forces in recent months to gain badly needed weapons, according to the military.

Norway-brokered peace talks stalled in 2004 after the rebels accused the government of instigating their inclusion in US and European terrorist blacklists.

The rebels seized four pistols from the guards during the prison break in. Four vans they used have been found abandoned in Lucena city in Quezon, about 70 miles (110 kilometres) southeast of Manila, he said.

In a separate attack, about 30 communist rebels triggered a US-made claymore mine then opened fire on an army convoy in southern Compostela Valley province Friday, killing six soldiers and wounding two others, the military said. -- AP