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MANAMA (AFP) - Riot police stormed through a Manama square in the dark early Thursday firing rubber bullets and tear gas in a harsh crackdown on anti-regime protesters that left four dead, witnesses and opposition said.

Up to 95 protesters were wounded when police launched the operation in the iconic Pearl Square without warning at around 3.00 am (midnight GMT), sending protesters fleeing in panic, they said.

"They attacked the square, where hundreds of people were spending the night in tents," said one witness, 37-year-old Fadel Ahmad.

At the city’s main Salmaniya hospital, medical staff were overwhelmed as ambulances and private cars were still ferrying in the injured more than three hours after the assault began.

Relatives of the victims gathered outside the hospital, angry and weeping.

During the operation, explosions and ambulance sirens could be heard a few hundred metres (yards) from the central square, which had been sealed off. Demonstrators fled pursued by security forces, as a helicopter flew overhead.

By dawn Thursday, police officers were clearing away the tents as acrid clouds of tear gas hung over the square.

Security forces were later in the morning deployed across Manama, with armed police blocking roads leading to the square and setting up checkpoints in other streets, causing heavy traffic congestion.

Bahrain’s authorities, defying US-led appeals for restraint, said they had no choice.

"The security forces evacuated Pearl Square ... after having exhausted all chance of dialogue," interior ministry spokesman General Tarek al-Hassan said, in a statement from the official news agency BNA.

"Some left the place of their own accord, while others refused to submit to the law, which required an intervention to disperse them," he said.

Thousands of demonstrators inspired by uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, had been occupying the square since Tuesday, after police killed two young Shiite demonstrators during anti-government protests.

The leader of the main Shiite opposition condemned it as a "savage and unjustified attack against a peaceful assembly."

Sheikh Ali Salman, head of the Islamic National Accord Association (INAA), told AFP: "This attack was a mistaken decision which will have catastrophic repercussions on the stability of Bahrain."

The INAA said riot police had opened fire without warning using rubber bullets.

Relatives named two of the dead as Mahmoud Makki Ali, 22, and Ali Mansour Ahmad Khoder, 52, though they did not indicate the circumstances of their deaths.

One of Khoder’s relatives said: "We refuse to receive the body until we get a written report on the main reasons behind his death."

An MP from INAA, Ali al-Aswad told AFP that a third protester shot in his chest with a hollow-point bullet died of his wounds, naming him as Hussein Zaid.

He said another protester, 60-year-old Issa Abdul Hassan died after being shot in the head by police, adding that at least 95 people were injured, some seriously.

Aswad also accused the security forces of denying ambulances access to the square to hospitalise injured protesters.

The latest deaths bring to six the number of demonstrators killed since the protests began on Monday in response to messages posted on Facebook.

Protesters had renamed Pearl Square as Tahrir (Liberation) Square, after the area in Cairo that became the focal point of an uprising that finally toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak last Friday after 18 days of nationwide protests.

On Wednesday, thousands of Bahrainis chanted for a "real constitutional monarchy" after the burial of the second protester.

But the atmosphere had been relaxed as thousands poured into Pearl Square after the funeral. The interior ministry had said it would allow demonstrators to stay in the square, "taking in consideration the feelings" of the people.

Before the latest clashes, the White House said Wednesday it was watching the developments "very closely" and called on Bahrain’s rulers to allow peaceful anti-government protests.

Bahrain serves as headquarters for a pillar of American military power, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which commands a rotating flotilla of vessels charged with safeguarding oil shipping lanes in the Gulf and countering Iran.

Gulf News Deputy Managing Editor Mick O’Reilly reports 

Bahraini security forces launched a full-out operation at 3am on Thursday using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear some 2,000 anti-government protesters from Pearl Monument Square in Manama.

One of  the dead men was 53 and the other, 23 years old.

Most protesters were sleeping when security forces moved in from four sides, leaving the demonstrators few means of escaping the thick and choking clouds of tear gas.

"I was sleeping when they came without any warning," said Saeed Ebrahim, as he took cover under a lorry parked at the nearby fish market.

Within 15 minutes, the security forces had regained the area around the monument, effectively ending a protest that began on Monday.

At Sulmaniya Hospital, ambulance dispatch officials said that more then 150 people were taken there, with a similar number being sent to a second city hospital.

Sporadic rounds of teargas were still being fired at the site of protests more than an hour after the operation began. The makeshift tent village which had sprung up in the past few days was largely deserted and abandoned as police officers combed the immediate vicinity for any protesters.

"There are many hurt. I saw many," said a truck driver, watching the operation unfold from his cab.

At 3.30am, Gulf News counted 12 ambulances moving from the square as hundreds of protesters fled the scene.

Desperate to escaping the choking clouds of tear gas, some young men ripped open bags of red onions at the nearby vegetable market, sniffing them to cut the bitter smell of gas.

Soon after the police operation ended, tow trucks began clearing abandoned vehicles from the immediate vicinity of the Pearl Monument. Other security force officers started to remove tents where, two hours earlier, women and children had been sleeping.