Officer and civilians among 11 killed in Kashmir
JAMMU, India (Reuters) - Suspected Muslim militants who slipped across the border from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir were shot dead by security forces after they killed six people in the Hindu-majority region of Jammu on Wednesday, police said.
The three militants disguised as policemen were holed up in a house for 18 hours where they killed three of nine hostages they were holding and set booby traps, officials said.
They had earlier shot dead two civilians and an army officer, before forcing their way into the house.
"The hostage crisis is over, all three militants have been killed," police officer Manohar Singh said. One injured hostage was rushed to a hospital, but fate of the remaining hostages were not immediately known.
In central Kashmir, two protesters were killed and more than a dozen injured when troops fired on protesters who police said defied a curfew and shouted pro-independence slogans.
Protests this month have convulsed the state of Jammu and Kashmir, sparked by a land row that has led to massive pro-independence demonstrations in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley and strikes in the more peaceful Jammu region.
The crisis has strained relations between India and Pakistan, which both claim the region in full but rule in parts, damaging a tentative peace process and raising fears Kashmir could again become a hotspot between the two nuclear rivals.
Authorities in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir stopped hundreds of people from staging a protest march to the Line of Control to express solidarity with Indian Kashmiris.
Thousands have died in a two-decade old insurgency against Indian rule.
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In India's Kashmir valley, authorities have imposed a curfew this week to defuse protests by Muslim separatists.
Police on Monday killed five protesters who defied the curfew in the Kashmir valley, bringing the death toll to at least 28. The demonstrations are the biggest against Indian rule since a revolt broke out in 1989.
More than 600 people have been injured in clashes over the two weeks of protests.
Residents in the Kashmir valley said they were running short of food and essentials due to the four-day long curfew.
"There is nothing left to eat now except a little rice," Rabia Noor, a 35-year-old housewife who lives in Srinagar, told Reuters by telephone.
Security forces have thrown barbed wire coils across roads in the valley and federal police are patrolling the deserted streets in Srinagar.
"The valley looks like a big prison," said 24-year-old Mohammad Usman, a university student.
Authorities have detained four senior separatist leaders since Monday to defuse protests and raided the homes of another dozen leaders.
The crisis began after the Kashmir government promised to give forest land to a Hindu trust that runs Amarnath, a cave shrine visited by Hindu pilgrims. Many Muslims were enraged.
The government then rescinded its decision, which in turn angered Hindus in Jammu who attacked trucks carrying supplies to Kashmir valley and blocked the region's highway, the only surface link with the rest of India. Challenging the blockade, Kashmiris took to the streets.
In the Kashmir valley, the protests have tentatively united a disparate group of separatists such as the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, which condemns militant violence, and the breakaway group of hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for years seen as marginalised.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Kashmir since armed revolt against New Delhi's rule broke out two decades ago.
(Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq in Srinagar and Abu Arqam Naqash in Muzaffarabad; Writing by Alistair Scrutton; Editing by Bappa Majumdar)
