Lima- Four police officers were killed in the northern Peruvian province of Huanuco, allegedly by members of the extreme-left rebel group Shining Path working in the service of drug gangs, Peruvian media reported Thursday citing the authorities.

The attack happened Wednesday, just three days after US President George W Bush, Chinese leader Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, among many other leaders, visited the country for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

"There are four dead police officers and four others injured," Peruvian Defence Minister Antero Flores Araoz told the radio station RPP.

The officers were ambushed in a jungle area in which drug gangs are active in which such incidents have already happened in the past.

Nobody had claimed responsibility for the attack in an area with large coca plantations, whose leaves constitute the raw material from which cocaine is made.

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) is believed to have killed 22 police and military officers since early October.

Shining Path violence brought Peru to near-destruction in the 1980s, when the Maoist rebel group exercised terror in its self-declared quest to set up a communist regime. It killed an estimated 70,000 people over two decades. However, it was virtually dismantled following the arrest in 1992 of its leader Abimael Guzman.

According to political observers in Lima, the renewed attacks of recent weeks are linked to the fact that the military have since late August entered areas that the state had not gone into for years. (dpa)