Yusuf Jameel
SRINAGAR, Feb 4 (1992)- Kashmiri militants breached security to bomb India’s television studio complex in the state’s summer capital Srinagar on Tuesday, police said.
They said the blast caused no casualties. But witnesses said it killed a policeman guarding the complex, which houses both of India’s state-run broadcasting services, Doordarshan television and All India Radio.
However, police reported three other deaths — a Kashmiri man killed by militants and two militants killed by the security forces — since Monday night in other parts of Kashmir, where nearly 6,000 people have died in a two-year-long rebellion.
The Allah Tigers, one of dozens of militant groups that have sprung up in India’s only Moslem-majority state, telephoned reporters to claim responsibility for the blast.
“We want to make known to the world that we can reach anywhere,” said a spokesman for the group.
Militants accuse the media of distorted reporting of the battle for Kashmir’s independence or merger with neighbouring Pakistan, an Islamic state.
“I had been receiving telephone threats from the militants, that they would blow up my office and studio, for the past 10 days,” Doordarshan regional director Farooq Nazki said after the bomb attack.
Earlier, witnesses said riot police attacked doctors returning from handing a memorandum denouncing Indian security forces to a United Nations office in Srinagar.
They said police surrounded the doctors’ cars and smashed the windows. One doctor was reported injured.
The doctors said the memorandum accused security forces of “random killings, arson, rape…and torture of prisoners”.
India acknowledges some excesses have occurred but dismisses most charges as militant propaganda.
Kashmiri police said on Tuesday they were pursuing two formal complaints against Indian security forces over killings last week. Police had intially reported the deaths as a result of a crossfire between militants and security forces.
The doctors handed their memorandandum to U.N. officials who monitor a tense ceasefire line in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, which controls a third of the Himalayan territory.
The two countries have fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 over Kashmir.
India accuses Pakistan of arming and training the militants, a charge Pakistan denies.
