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PORT-AU-PRINCE : Eight people were injured as thousands of youths gathered in the Haitian capital demanding President Jean Bertrand Aristide's resignation, in the biggest protest of its kind seen since Aristide's rise to power in the early 1990s.
Hospital sources said the injured included two people who suffered gunshot wounds and three hit by a speeding police car, as anti-riot police pushed protestors back from the grounds of the National Palace, the government seat.
Police lobbed tear gas grenades and fired shots in the air to scatter the youthful protestors.
At one point, the anti-Aristide demonstrators and pro-government activists threw stones at one another near the palace.
Aristide, leading the Caribbean's most impoverished nation for the second time in a five-year term of office that ends in 2006, first governed Haiti from 1991 to 1996.
Two leading politicians who recently fled the Aristide camp - Senator Dany Toussaint, who was interim police chief during the president's first term, and Prince Sonson Pierre, a member of the reform-oriented arm of Aristide's Lavalas party -- took part in the anti-government protest.
- AFP
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