Two policemen were killed and seven people seriously injured in a shoot-out which erupted during a routine stop-and-search operation in a north Moscow flea market, a Moscow police spokesman said Friday.


Alexander Cherednikov said there had been no indications of a serious confrontation brewing when a police squad began a planned document check in the Petrovsko-Razumovsky market, northern Moscow, at midday Thursday.


"Such markets are parts of the usual police raids because of their abnormally high crime levels," Cherednikov said. "Usually such raids lead to the detention of people, mainly Caucasians, who do not have proper registered documents to live in the city."


Cherednikov said the police had detained two people without any documents. "Then things started happening like a detective movie."


"The police made a mistake in that they did not search the men," he said. "When the detainees were brought to a police room, one of them opened fire with a handgun he had been hiding under a raincoat thrown over his arm."


Cherednikov said three policemen were seriously injured, including senior sergeant Yury Kiselyov, 31, who later died in the hospital. Kiselyov had a wife and two children, Cherednikov said.


He said the suspects had started to run away, pursued by police and security guards. One of the men had opened fire again, wounding three more police and two other people, before scaling the market's two-meter fence.


Behind the fence there was a railroad where they met two more policemen who had arrived to investigate the gunfire. The men opened fire again, hitting one policeman in the head and killing him instantly. Cherednikov identified the dead man as Sergei Yermakov, 28. "The second policeman opened fire from a Kalashnikov sub-machine gun and managed to wound one of the killers, who was then immediately detained," he said. "The other one escaped."