One border guard was killed and two wounded in an armed attack close to Kyrgyzstan's volatile border with Central Asian neighbour Tajikistan, official said Saturday.

Authorities in the ex-Soviet state were probing the incident after unknown assailants opened fire late Friday on a border guard base some 25 kilometres from the frontier, Kyrgyzstan's deputy prime minister Abdyrakhman Mamatiliev said.

The Kyrgyz border with Tajikistan sees sporadic outbursts of violence mainly due to local disagreements over land rights.

The Fergana valley area, densely populated and straddling the territories of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, has seen clashes since becoming independent from Soviet rule in the early 1990s, as precise borders were never agreed.

Violence has intensified in recent years as global warming has shrunken glaciers and cut water supplies, flaring cross-border tensions.

Energy-poor Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are also planning damming projects to address energy shortages, enraging their more populous downstream neighbour Uzbekistan which has a huge cotton industry.