Jamaica's top policeman vowed today to capture the reputed underworld boss who escaped a bloody four-day assault on his slum stronghold amid growing claims that innocent people died during the fighting.

At a news conference in the capital Kingston, police Commissioner Owen Ellington said authorities believed Christopher "Dudus" Coke, wanted by the US on drugs and gun trafficking charges, was hiding somewhere on the tropical island of 2.6 million inhabitants.

"We will catch him, we will execute that warrant and he will face justice," Mr Ellington said. He said the "best intelligence we have" indicated Coke remained in Jamaica.

Officials said previously Coke might have escaped Jamaica before thousands of soldiers and police invaded the Tivoli Gardens slum on Monday in an effort to arrest him for extradition to New York.

Police say their offensive was launched after co-ordinated attacks by gangsters who shot up 14 police stations, burning two to the ground, in an effort to protect 41-year-old Coke from extradition.

So far, 70 civilians and three security officers are listed by the government as killed during the fighting.

US authorities say Coke has been trafficking cocaine to the streets of New York City since the mid-1990s.

A US law enforcement official in New York said a lawyer for Coke has been in talks with the US Justice Department about his client's possible safe removal to New York to face charges.

Coke is said to fear suffering the same fate as his father, a gang leader known as Jim Brown, who died in a prison fire in 1992 while awaiting extradition to the US on drug charges.

It was unclear if arrangements to surrender had been made. Coke's lead lawyer, Don Foote, did not return phone messages seeking comment on the report.

People in the gritty slums of the capital have made numerous allegations that police and soldiers sprayed bullets wildly when they stormed neighbourhoods that had been barricaded by Coke's loyalists in West Kingston, where reggae music was born.

In an overgrown area of a cemetery across from the still-restive slum of Denham Town, the stench of decaying bodies hung in the air yesterday. At least 11 rough-hewn wooden coffins contained corpses, parts of their bodies exposed to buzzing black flies.

Mr Ellington said 15 "badly decomposed" bodies of civilians shot during the security offensive were taken to the May Pen cemetery by overwhelmed undertakers at local funeral homes.

"The undertakers told us they could not take them into storage," he said, stressing that photographs of the dead would be posted in the slums so people could identify missing relatives. He said police had "no interest whatsoever to bury bodies in secret".

But numerous people said they were convinced many more slum dwellers were killed than authorities had reported.

One Tivoli Gardens woman told Associated Press reporters that she and her two children hid in their apartment as soldiers and police swarmed the complex on Tuesday, shouting for everyone to come out into the open.

When the family ignored the warning, she said, a soldier shot through the locked door and the fragmented bullet hit her left leg.

"There are innocent people that were dying," said the 49-year-old woman, recovering at a relative's house outside Kingston.

"They fire the shot that hit me through the door. They didn't know if there was a child right there. I'm afraid of them right now, I'm afraid of them."

The commissioner said two women had been killed in the Tivoli Gardens fighting, but the tally could not be independently confirmed. He said everyone else killed during the raid were men and several gunmen "were dressed as females" seeking to avoid getting shot.

"We have heard allegations of misconduct. We are determined to investigate every one of them," Mr Ellington said.

Information Minister Daryl Vaz has said the government would conduct an independent investigation into police actions during the raid.

He said prime minister Bruce Golding's government was "very concerned" about allegations of deliberate killings at Coke's stronghold by security forces, which have long had a reputation for being indiscriminate with their weapons.

Meanwhile police showed evidence of home-made bombs they said were found at Tivoli Gardens, some attached to barricades of concertina wire and vandalised cars.

Security officials said they had recovered about two dozen firearms and 7,000 rounds of ammunition. They said Coke's defenders "may have received help from foreign sources", but did not say who that might have been.