Reports from the West African republic of Guinea say twenty-three people have been killed in clashes between two rival groups in the south-west.

Another forty are said to have been injured -- nineteen of them critically.

A BBC correspondent in Guinea says the clashes broke out on Monday over a land dispute between the Toma and Manyam peoples in Macenta, eight-hundred kilometres from the capital, Conakry.

About seventy houses were burnt down.

But our correspondent says life has been returning to normal, following the deployment of security forces and imposition of a curfew. The dead include one worker with the Red Cross, which has been helping to look after hundreds-of-thousands of refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service