India Police Kill Militants Near Kashmiri Shrine

NEW DELHI —  In renewed fighting near Kashmir’s most sacred shrine, Indian forces armed with machine guns, mortars and grenades Saturday killed at least 22 separatist militants who had vacated the site earlier in the week.

P. S. Gill, inspector general of police, claimed that the rebels had been planning to reenter the Hazratbal shrine and mosque and barricade themselves inside.

Reports from the scene said Indian troops blasted the headquarters of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) faction and raked it with machine-gun fire for about three hours until it collapsed. Two buildings were set ablaze.

“This is the most savage and barbarous act that I have seen the Indians do,” Amanullah Khan, the founder of the rebel group, said from his base in Pakistan.

He said Indians are living in a “fool’s paradise” if they believe such actions can end the anti-Indian struggle in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Since 1989, about 20,000 people have died as guerrillas have waged war in favor of independence or unification with Pakistan.

The gun battle outside Hazratbal broke out four days after JKLF militants peacefully evacuated the domed compound near the city of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir’s summer capital, and moved to a building about 50 yards away.

They had been holed up for three days inside the lakeside shrine, which is said to house a hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s beard, after a clash with police in which at least 11 people died.

Before dawn Saturday, police cordoned off the building being used by the militants and ordered them to surrender their weapons and leave.

The rebels accused Indian authorities of reneging on their pledge to allow them free passage with their guns. Government officials denied that they had made such a promise.

“There was no agreement. The militants had started piling up weapons in the house near the shrine, and we had to clean the area,” a spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir state government told Reuters news agency.

Instead of complying with the police order, officials said, the militants opened fire about 5:30 a.m. A. K. Suri, a senior police officer in Srinagar, said six adults and three children walked out of the building before the firing began. Police said 22 militants died.

The JKLF faction claimed that 25 people--including its president, three women, three children and well-known separatist leader Shabir Siddiqui--were killed.

There were no dead on the Indian side, but the United News of India agency said six policemen were hit by bullets.

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Since February 1990, Jammu and Kashmir has been under direct rule from New Delhi, but the government of Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao recently finalized plans to hold parliamentary elections in the troubled state in May.

“The people have now realized that, where there is ballot, there is no place for bullet,” Syed Sibtey Razi, an Indian minister of state for home affairs, said in Jammu, the winter capital of the former principality in the Himalayas.

Despite such optimistic talk, the number of candidates and voters is expected to be abysmally low.

An umbrella group of separatist organizations has called on Kashmiris to boycott the polls.