Rains have cleared the skies over Indonesia's Sumatra island, where raging fires caused a haze which also choked Malaysia and Thailand in recent weeks, officials and police said today.

"The sky is clear now, with visibility at around eight kilometers at 11am," Sarman, from a meteorology office in Riau province, told AFP. He said rain had fallen for three days.

Riau province has been one of the main sources of forest and bush fires responsible for a hazardous blanket of smoke that has smothered the region and sparked calls from Southeast Asian nations for tough action against culprits.

Rain late yesterday also helped clear Labuhan Batu, a district in North Sumatra province bordering Riau and another source of the haze, Sergeant Master Damanik of the police headquarters said.

"The haze was still there yesterday but because of the rain last night, the sky is quite clear this morning," he said.

In Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, rains have fallen since Tuesday and gradually cleared the sky there too, a local meteorology office worker who gave his name as Wahyu said.

Relief from shifting winds

Hundreds of fires on Sumatra island last week smothered the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur and surrounding districts as well as the west coast where pollution reached hazardous levels.

Shifting winds brought relief to those areas over the weekend but pushed the problem north to regions along the Malaysia-Thailand border and onto the Thai resort island of Phuket.

According to Malaysia's Department of Environment, the Air Pollutant Index in the areas around Kuala Lumpur today shows "moderate" levels of between 50 - 100.

Malaysia and Indonesia have been trading accusations of blame over the forest fires, said to be caused by plantation companies' use of fire to clear land.

Officials from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Malaysia yesterday called for the group's members to fight the fires because drier weather conditions with below average rainfall was expected until October in parts of Sumatra and Borneo island, where fires are also burning.

In 1997 and 1998 choking haze caused mainly by Indonesian forest fires enveloped parts of Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, for months.