CAIRO - Thousands of riot police swinging truncheons brutally cleared a Sudanese refugee protest camp early Friday, and at least 10 refugees, including a young girl, died in the melee that capped a night in which authorities intermittently conducted last-ditch negotiations and doused the squatters with water canons.

While authorities said 10 protesters were dead and 23 police wounded, Boutrous Deng, one of the protest leaders, told The Associated Press that 15 Sudanese were killed, including two children.

The deadly clashes occurred shortly before dawn Friday, ending a three-month protest, as thousands of riot police encircled the ramshackle camp of plastic sheeting and cardboard located in a small park alongside a main Cairo boulevard.

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In Geneva, Switzerland, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, expressed his shock and sadness over the violence and deaths.

"Although we still do not have all of the details or a clear picture of what transpired, violence left several people dead and injured," Guterres said. "There is no justification for such violence and loss of life. This is a terrible tragedy and our condolences go to all the families of those who died and to the injured."

The protesters, who were in Egypt to escape violence in neighboring Sudan, set up the camp on Sept. 29 to draw attention to their demands to be resettled in a third country.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said it had acted in part after the UNHCR asked for protection "after receiving threats to attack the commision offices and its members."

Officials at the South Center, an independent Sudanese human rights monitoring group, said 1,280 refugees were taken by bus to three locations outside Cairo. About 700 were taken to a camp used by security forces in Liman Torah, a prison north of Cairo. The rest were transfered to camps in Dahshour and Mensheit Nasser, the officials said.

In a statement faxed to AP in Cairo, the group described the police assault as "brutal."

"The savage way the security forces intervened led to a real human massacre," the statement said.

In a showdown played out during the first five hours of Friday, the protesters dismantled the camp, but most refused to leave on buses brought in to take them to camps elsewhere in the city.

Police fired water cannons at the group, some of whom defiantly shouted "Allahu Akbar" and stood their ground. The authorities negotiated with the protest leaders in between bursts of water canon. At about 5 A.M., after a final dousing with water canons, police swarmed into the park from all directions.

The Associated Press saw police brutally attacking the Sudanese with truncheons. In many cases, police continued to beat protesters even as they were being dragged away to buses. The AP saw two adults and a young girl, apparently three or four years old, being carried away unconscious. An emergency medical worker in an ambulance said the girl was dead.

One protester being dragged away by two policemen was clubbed with a tree branch about the size of a man's arm by a third police officer.

Egypt's Interior Ministry blamed the violence on the protesters.

"Attempts were made to persuade them to disperse, but to no avail," the ministry said in a statement. "The migrants' leaders resorted to incitement and attacks against the police."

The clashes caused a stampede in which 30 people were wounded, "mostly elderly and children," the ministry said. Ten of the injured died in hospitals, it said, adding that 23 police were also injured.

The AP saw no stampede. The protesters could not flee because the camp was completely encircled by police, with water canons at each corner. Protesters could be seen fighting back with long sticks that appeared to be supports for makeshift tents.

Astrid Van Genderen Stort, a spokeswoman for the UNHCR in Cairo, said hand-to-hand fighting broke out when truncheon-wielding police lunged into the camp.

"It is extremely sad that people had to die," Van Genderen Stort said.

The UNHCR announced last week that it had reached a deal with some of the protest leaders promising to resume hearing some cases and offering a one-time payment of up to $700 for housing.

But most of those in the camp rejected the deal, saying they wanted promises of resettlement abroad.

The sit-in began Sept. 29 after the UNHCR stopped hearing the cases of Sudanese seeking refugee status after the January peace deal that ended their home country's 21-year civil war.

Hundreds of Sudanese had lived in the camp for three months, demanding the UN refugee agency promise them resettlement abroad. At some points in the protest, as many as 2,000 Sudanese - men, women and children - were crammed into the camp, about the size of four tennis courts.

Asylum-seekers generally must be granted refugee status to be resettled in countries such as the United States, Australia and Britain.

About 30,000 Sudanese are registered as refugees in Egypt, and estimates of Sudanese living in this country have ranged from 200,000 to several million.

But Egypt, which suffers from high unemployment and strained social services for its own population of 72 million, offers the Sudanese little assistance, and the Sudanese complain of discrimination by Egyptians.