PESHAWAR, Pakistan, April 23 (Reuters) - At least four children were killed in a gunbattle between security forces and tribesmen protesting over the arrest of a hardline Islamic cleric in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, officials said.

Witnesses and hospital sources, however, put the death toll at eight.

The shootout erupted in Bara town in Khyber tribal region, near the Afghan border, after security forces opened fire in the air to disperse the crowd of protesting tribesmen and children.

Nine people, most of them children, were wounded in exchange of fire.

"These people were using children for their vested interests and not a single child was killed by our firing," Arbab Arif, secretary of Pakistan's seven tribal regions, told a news conference.

The cleric, Mufti Munir Shakir, was arrested last year after he incited tribesmen to expel a rival Afghan preacher from the region and attacked his followers.

Khyber is one of Pakistan's seven semi-autonomous tribal regions, known as Federally Administrative Tribal Areas. The region has been relatively free of al Qaeda and Taliban-linked militant violence, but has become a battleground for the loyalists of the two rival clerics over the past year.

At least 26 people were killed in clashes between factions led by the rival clerics in March 2006.

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