Suspected FARC guerrillas killed a policeman and a boy and wounded 27 other people, many of them children, in a grenade and gunfire attack in a town in southern Colombia, local officials said Tuesday.

Rebels launched a grenade and opened fire in the town of Miraflores late Monday as firefighters, police and townspeople were fighting a blaze in a house, the town's mayor told radio Caracol.

Julio Cesar Gonzalez, the mayor of the Amazon basin river town, said police repelled the attack with backing from the air by the military.

But the grenade explosion killed a policeman and a 10-year-old boy and 27 others, most of them children, were wounded, he said.

Nine of the wounded were in serious condition and had to be evacuated by air to the city of Villavicencio, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Bogota, he said. Miraflores is in the southern province of Guaviare.

The attack comes as representatives of the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are engaged in peace talks in Havana.

The FARC, which has an estimated 8,000 fighters, is the country's largest leftist guerrilla group.