SRINAGAR, Jan 31 (2002): A bomb explosion killed three men on Thursday in a market place in India’s rebellion-torn Jammu and Kashmir state, the region at the heart of a tense military stand-off between India and Pakistan.
The blast happened near a crowded bus station in Reasi town, 80 km (50 miles) from Jammu, the winter capital of the Muslim majority state where Indian forces are struggling to quell a 12-year-old revolt.
“It was an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) set off by a timer,” a police official said. The dead were labourers. Six other people were wounded.
Police said unidentified gunmen also shot dead two people, including a 15-year-old girl, on Thursday morning in the Lassipora area of Kupwara district, northwest of the state’s summer capital Srinagar.
New Delhi and Islamabad have mobilised close to a million troops on their border after India blamed Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups for a bloody attack on its parliament.
Indian government leaders have said there are no signs of a change on the ground in Kashmir despite Pakistan’s promise to crack down on Muslim militants.
Two members of the pro-Pakistan Hizb-ul-Mujahideen militant group were killed on Wednesday evening in a fierce gunbattle with Indian paramilitary troops in Kupwara district, police said.
“The dead include Shamsuddin Ahmad, battalion commander of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, who was responsible for a series of landmine explosions in north Kashmir,” an Indian paramilitary spokesman said.
Elsewhere in the Himalayan region, two civilians and two rebels were killed in separate shootouts.
An army spokesman said security forces recovered a large amount of arms and munitions from a militant hideout in the Uri area near the border with Pakistan, west of Srinagar.
“Twenty kilos of RDX (Research and Development Explosive), 50 grenades, five IEDs and other ammunition was recovered from a militant hideout in Uri,” the spokesman said.
Two members of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, one of two militant groups blamed for last month’s attack on the Indian parliament, surrendered before security forces in Tral area of south Kashmir.
India, which controls 45 percent of disputed Kashmir, accuses Pakistan of arming and training Muslim rebels, a charge Islamabad denies. Pakistan controls over a third and China the rest.
Authorities say more than 33,000 people have been killed since a rebellion broke out in the region at the end of 1989. But separatists put the toll closer to 80,000.
