Sri Lankan police officers stand guard near the site of a shootout.—AP Photo

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka's military says three soldiers were killed when a personal dispute erupted into a gunfight.

Military spokesman Brig Wimal Hapuarachchi says the three soldiers were on duty in the country's former civil war zone in the northern Jaffna peninsula when the gunfight broke out Thursday night.

He said Friday that an initial investigation revealed that the shooting took place as a result of a personal dispute among the three soldiers.

Jaffna is the cultural heartland of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. Government forces crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009, ending a quarter-century insurgency for a separate Tamil state in the country's north and east.

Jaffna has been under the control of government troops since 1995.