By Tito Belo

DILI, May 23 (Reuters) - An East Timor fugitive army rebel said on Wednesday he would not surrender any time soon despite appeals from the nation's newly elected president, saying some in the government wanted him dead.

Alfredo Reinado escaped last August along with 50 other inmates from a prison where he was being held on charges of involvement in a wave of violence that killed 37 people and drove 150,000 from their homes earlier that year.

"I will not surrender any time soon. I may never even surrender. Our leaders do not want me to surrender. They want me dead," Reinado told Reuters by telephone.

He said President Jose Ramos Horta, who won this month's presidential election run-off by a landslide, had no power to prevent radicals from the left-wing ruling Fretilin party from killing him.

Reinado, East Timor's former military police chief, has been accused of raiding a police post and making off with 25 automatic weapons while on the run.

He managed to evade a raid by Australian-led troops in March, which caused thousands of his supporters to protest in the capital.

Reinado said he would only turn himself in once Fretilin is no longer in power and foreign troops sent into East Timor after last year's violence are out of the country.

Divisions in East Timor's security forces led to riots last year that spun into deadly violence in which some 30 people died. Foreign troops were sent in to quell the unrest.

"I am feeling that now we are being colonised by the Australians like what they are doing to Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and other Pacific countries," he said.

"I do respect Australian citizens, but not their government. They obey the Timorese leaders' request to hunt me as if I was Pablo Escobar or a mafia leader that should be killed," he said, referring to the infamous Colombian cocaine dealer who was killed in 1993.

Interim Prime Minister Estanislau da Silva said the government had no intention of killing Reinado.

"No, this is completely incorrect. I consider this serious slander and a serious accusation," da Silva told reporters.

"I can only speak when I face Major Alfredo as my Timorese brother who wants some change in our country and things are changing when we are sitting together at a table without false accusations against each other," he said.

Ramos-Horta, a Nobel peace prize winner who spent years abroad as a spokesman for East Timor's struggle for independence from Indonesian occupation, was installed as president on Sunday.

His victory has raised hopes of greater stability in a nation still struggling to heal divisions five years after it won independence from Indonesia.

East Timor will go to the polls again on June 30 in parliamentary elections.

Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1975 after long-time colonial power Portugal had set it free.

East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in a violence-marred referendum in 1999. It became fully independent in 2002 after a period of U.N. administration.

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