"Yesterday, nine people were killed and more than 100 were wounded during a riot," before a championship football match in the northern city of Qameshli, Abdel Aziz Dawd said.

"Five others were shot and killed today (Saturday) by riot police," during protests against the previous day's deaths, added Dawd, secretary general of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive party.

Six of those killed Friday were shot by live bullets, while the other three were children, aged between 10 and 15, who were trampled to death in the panic which erupted after the shooting in the city's stadium, he said.

Damascus has ordered an inquiry into what happened in Qameshli on the Turkish border, 600 kilometres (375 miles) northwest of the capital, state television reported late Saturday.

Earlier in the day, dozens of people sustained bullet wounds in Qameshli and two neighbouring towns as thousands of Kurds gathered to protest against the police deaths.

In the morning, police clashed with Kurds who "threw stones at government buildings, including the customs office and the youth centre," said Abdel Baki Yussef, secretary general of the Kurdish party Yakiti.

The protests then spread to neighbouring towns and villages, where police "fired at the Kurdish population who threw stones at them," he added.

Meanwhile the trouble also spread to the capital Damascus, where several demonstrators were wounded and others were arrested in the western suburb of Dummar amid a similar protest, said Faisal Yussef, a member of the Progressive Kurdish Democracy Party.

By late Saturday, Yussef said that calm had returned to Qameshli as security was stepped up in Kurdish areas, including Dummar and the Rukneddin districts in southern Damascus.

In Lebanon, the Kurdish Democratic Party accused Syrian forces of "massacring the Kurdish civilian population in Qameshli, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 400," in a statement on its website.

"At what was supposed to be a football match ... the intelligence services turned on the Kurdish crowd," it charged.

Several other Kurdish parties, which represent the country's sizable ethnic minority, accused police Saturday of opening fire the night before on fans of Qameshli's Al-Jihad football club before a match against its rival Al-Fatwa.

Kurdish parties and a human rights association said al-Fatwa supporters thronged the streets, denouncing Kurdish leaders in Iraq and brandishing pictures of ousted leader Saddam Hussein.

The marches degenerated into clashes in the terraces and police officers fired on supporters of the Kurdish team, said a statement signed by Kurdish parties and the Defence Committees of Human Rights in Syria.

Calling for an independent investigation into the incident, the statement urged authorities to "severely punish" those who orchestrated the "carnage," while pressing Kurds to exercise "self-restraint".

"What happened is against the law. A commission has been set up to investigate the incident," state television said.

"Bandits undermined stability and security in the governorate of Hassakeh," the television added, in the first official mention of the unrest.

"Conspirators, who used what happened in the city stadium (before the football match) to sabotage private and public property and who sparked the troubles, were motivated by foreign ideas," the television said.

But the report made no mention of the 14 Kurds that Syrian Kurdish officials said were killed in the unrest.