Tirana:
Hundreds of Albanian police tightened their siege on a village known as Europe's cannabis capital on Tuesday as gun battles between security forces and suspected drug dealers raged for a second day.
Police who tried to enter the southern village of Lazarat on Monday to destroy a huge drugs stockpile were repelled by heavy weapons fire, including anti-tank missiles and grenades. One officer has been wounded.
Two more people were wounded in a gunfight later Tuesday, police said.
"Two shepherds, 19 and 30 years old, who are not from Lazarat but came under fire from drug dealers in the centre of the village," police spokeswoman Laura Totraku told AFP.
Police urged all people who "are not residents of Lazarat to quit the village as their lives could be endangered in the shooting by drug dealers, to whom everybody who is not from the village is suspicious," she said.
Some 800 security personnel wearing bulletproof vests and backed by armoured vehicles surrounded Lazarat after intense shootouts with local traffickers.
"We urge the traffickers to cease fire and hand over their weapons," police chief Artan Didi said, adding that residents had been "taken hostage by a group of criminals".
Police said they had arrested six people suspected of firing at security forces and had destroyed more than 10,000 cannabis plants around Lazarat.
"We are determined to continue the operation and destroy all cannabis plants," a police spokeswoman said.
Sporadic shooting continued on Tuesday, a resident told AFP.
Italian police say Lazarat, 240 kilometres (150 miles) south of Tirana, annually produces about 900 tonnes of cannabis worth some 4.5 billion euros ($6.1 billion) -- equivalent to almost half of Albania's gross domestic product.
Albania is Europe's leading cannabis producer despite efforts by authorities, who claim to destroy between 90,000 and 130,000 cannabis plants every year.
Hooded gunmen attacked another local journalist and smashed his camera after he tried to film Lazarat.
The Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a statement that "violence against journalists is unacceptable; safety is a basic pre-condition for their work."
On Monday, village gunmen attacked a journalist, cameraman and a driver working for Albanian television, torching their vehicle and confiscating their possessions.
Lazarat mayor Dashnor Aliko told reporters he was negotiating with the traffickers to turn themselves in, but Interior Minister Saimir Tahiri said "there is no negotiating with a criminal group that takes honest residents of Lazarat as hostages."
"There will be no tolerance for them," the minister told police and justice officials as well as local authorities at a meeting in nearby town of Gjirokastra.
In a statement released to media, police said they had taken control of two dozen houses in the village, seizing hundreds of kilogrammes of cannabis, pressing machines and a large amount of ammunition.