(Writes through)

BEIJING, Jan 9 (Reuters) - A Chinese court jailed three villagers for up to five years in prison on Monday for their roles in a violent protest over factory pollution, defence lawyers said.

China has seen a surge of bitter, sometimes violent, protests over rampant official corruption, a widening wealth gap, pollution and land grabs. Official record showed there were 74,000 "mass incidents" in 2004, up by 16,000 from 2003.

Thousands rioted outside the city of Dongyang in eastern Zhejiang province last April -- injuring up to 50 policemen -- after rumours spread that two of about 200 elderly women keeping a two-week vigil at an industrial site died during police efforts to disperse them.

The People's Court in nearby Lanxi city sentenced Liu Huirong, 29, to five years in prison on a charge of assault, defence lawyers Wei Rujiu and Li Heping said by telephone.

Wang Liangping, 39, was given a 15-month jail sentence and Wang Zhongliang, 34, one year, both on a charge of creating disturbances, Wei said.

Six other villagers were also convicted of creating disturbances but received suspended sentences and would be freed on Monday, Wei said. Eight of the nine defendants said police had forced confessions out of them, Wei said.

"Nobody here accepts the verdicts. The facts are clear but the court ignored all of them," Liu's wife, Si Xiaoying, told Reuters. "My husband even saved a policeman. They just want to find a scapegoat and close the case as soon as possible."

Liu and Wang Liangping plan to appeal.

The Lanxi court and Dongyang government declined to comment.

Protesters in the township of Huashui clashed with several thousand government workers and police, who were outnumbered and fled the scene, after trying without success to tear down sheds and roadblocks set up by villagers outside the industrial park housing 13 chemical factories.

They had complained poisonous waste from the factories had caused cancers and still births since they were built in 2001.

Tang Yong and Chen Fengwei, Dongyang's Communist Party chief and mayor at the time, were later sacked from new posts in December, Xinhua news agency has said.

The lawyer Wei said that with the dismissals and the sentences, local authorities wanted to show they had given "50 slaps" to both sides, appeasing and deterring the villagers at the same time.

The villagers, however, were not satisfied, Liu's wife, Si, said.

"It is the officials who caused all this by first building the factories and then cracking down on protesters," she said. "We were just defending ourselves but we got the harsher punishment."

Factories in the industrial park had been shut down after the violence but no compensation had been offered to the villagers, Si said.

Heavily industrialised Zhejiang saw at least three major demonstrations over industrial pollution last year, including one in August when protesters set fire to factory buildings and police cars at a battery plant.