Libyan forces in more than a dozen military vehicles and armed with anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers have crossed the border with Tunisia and been involved in clashes in a frontier town, witnesses said.

Tunisia's government was outraged and demanded Libya halt all incursions into its territory.

There were different accounts from witnesses of exactly what happened in the Tunisian town of Dhuheiba, about three miles (five kilometres) from the border.

But several said Tunisian troops captured and disarmed some of the loyalists of Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi and drove others out of town. Three Tunisians were hurt, they said.

The Tunisian government expressed "extreme indignation" over the violation of its territory.

Ismail al-Wafi, a Dhuheiba resident, said the Libyan forces drove into the town and fired indiscriminately. Dhuheiba residents clashed with the Libyans and Tunisian troops eventually captured some and took their weapons.

Another witness said Libyan troops clashed with Libyan rebels in Dhuheiba before they were defeated by Tunisian troops. Some of the Libyans were captured and the others chased out, said the witness.

"Gaddafi forces are no longer in Dhuheiba. They were defeated," he said.

The Tunisian news agency TAP said Tunisian forces fired in the air, but did not clash with Libyan troops.

The Dhuheiba border crossing has been a flashpoint in recent days. The crossing has been changing hands repeatedly between rebels and regime forces.

At some point today, rebels retook the crossing, according to an Associated Press Television News crew at the scene. That restored a vital supply line to besieged rebel strongholds in western Libya.

The AP crew saw two bodies of Libyan troops near the crossing and were told rebels were chasing two dozen Libyan military vehicles on the Libyan side in hopes of securing a supply corridor to the mountain area.

The Nafusa mountain range in western Libya, close to Tunisia, has emerged in recent days as a more troublesome pocket of resistance to Gaddafi forces. The mountain area is home to members of Libya's ethnic Berber community who have complained of systematic discrimination by the Libyan government.

Along with the besieged western city of Misrata, the Nafusa range is one of the major centres of opposition to Gaddafi in the western half of Libya.

Thousands of Libyans from the Nafusa mountain communities have fled to Dhuheiba and other Tunisian border towns in recent weeks, as rebels and government forces battled for control of the border crossing.

On the Misrata front, regime forces fired shells, mortars and rockets into the besieged coastal city.

A doctor at Misrata's main hospital said two people were killed and 17 wounded today. One of the dead, a middle-aged man, had been shot in the chest while sitting outside his home in a southern neighbourhood, next to Misrata's airport where some of Gaddafi's forces have taken up positions.

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