National police said they shot and killed Kelly Kwalik, leader of the pro-independence Free Papua Movement, in a gun battle during an early morning raid on a house in the town of Timika, in the province of Papua.

Police also arrested five people ages 21 to 60, including a 10-year-old boy. The suspects will be sent to Jakarta for questioning, according to a report on the Jakarta Globe Web site.

Several Indonesian media outlets report that police have sent the body for DNA testing to be absolutely sure it is the man who has led the movement, deemed a terrorist organization by the government, since the 1970s.

Indonesia's Papua province is the western half of New Guinea, the world's second-largest island. The independent state of Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of the island, which for centuries was a Dutch colony. It was occupied by the Japanese during World War II and eventually liberated by U.S. Gen. MacArthur's troops. Around 75 percent of its 2 million people are Christian and 23 percent Muslim.

It was annexed by Indonesia from the Dutch in the early 1960s. A subsequent limited eligibility vote -- deemed rigged by U.N. groups and foreign governments -- was narrowly in favor of official integration with Indonesia.

The Free Papua Movement has been fighting a low-level guerrilla war ever since, often raiding workers and the sites of foreign-owned forestry and mining companies. The Javanese population from mainland Indonesia is against the movement. But the ethnically different Melanesian Papuans are sympathetic, not least because they feel their well-being is being neglected in the selloff of natural resources.

Kwalik is thought to have helped plan the fatal August 2002 ambush of a convoy of buses taking employees to the massive Grasberg gold mine run by U.S. company Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold. Two American civilians and an Indonesian were killed in the worst attacks suffered by the mining business that excavates the 1-mile wide open pit, the world's largest producer of copper.

Kwalik is also blamed for the attack last July in which an Australian technician and two other mining employees were killed in a similar ambush.

The death of Kwalik could be a blow to the independence movement. A spokesman for the Australia-based Institute for Papuan Advocacy and Human Rights said the ethnic Melanesians think of him as embodying their freedom struggle.

He became involved after his tribal land was taken over by the Grasberg mine in the 1970s. Most of his family was later killed in fighting with security forces, a report on Radio New Zealand said.

Kwalik, although described as charismatic, was an elusive figure and lived mostly in the bush. Many of his associates have dismissed his involvement with the fatal attacks as Indonesian government propaganda, the radio report said.

The institute's Matthew Jamieson said in the beginning he was involved in the armed liberation struggle but in the past few years had adopted a non-violent approach and not targeted people.

At the end of November more than a dozen Papuans were arrested during a peaceful rally to celebrate the 48th anniversary of the founding of the Free Papua Movement, according to an earlier report in the Jakarta Globe.

Riot police made the arrests as they dispersed up to 40 activists who had gathered in the provincial capital Jayapura carrying posters with separatist symbols that had been banned by the state.

Police also confiscated three Papuan traditional musical instrument called tifa and the movement's independence flag, the Morning Star.

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