BOGOTA, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Three children were killed and 12 other people were wounded in a machine-gun and mortar attack by Marxist rebels in a town in southwestern Colombia on Tuesday, police said.

A local police chief blamed the assault on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, saying rebels had fired home-made missiles at a police station in Roberto Payan, which lies in the Pacific coast province of Narino.

"They launched some mortars and civilians were affected. Three children were killed and 12 others were hurt," provincial police chief Col. William Montesuma told Reuters, adding that the gas-cylinder mortars had missed the police station and instead hit homes where residents were taking cover.

The children killed were aged 8, 11 and 12, Montesuma said.

Colombia's four-decades war has eased as President Alvaro Uribe has stepped up a U.S.-funded military campaign against the rebels, driving them further into mountains and jungles.

However, the Pacific coast area where Tuesday's attack took place is a major route for drug traffickers shipping cocaine to the United States and Mexico and violence continues to plague the area.

Once a mighty peasant army that controlled swaths of Colombia in their fight for a socialist state, the FARC has been battered over the last year by the deaths of commanders and the rescue of a group of high-profile hostages.

(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; writing by Helen Popper; editing by Vicki Allen)

AlertNet news is provided by