Guerrillas in Kashmir Kidnap Israelis; 3 Killed in Gun Battle

Six Israelis, kidnaped from a houseboat and told they would be killed for being Jewish, overpowered their Kashmiri Muslim captors, officials said Thursday. One Israeli and two abductors were killed.

“They said it was the last second of our lives,” one of the Israelis, Koby Shemesh, said on Israel Army Radio in an interview from a hospital in Srinagar. “They said if we were Jews, they would have to execute us.”

The Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, one of a score of Kashmiri guerrilla groups, claimed responsibility for the incident late Wednesday and accused the six Israeli men of being commandos.

Two Israelis were wounded in the fighting and one is missing, according to Rajan Bakshi, deputy inspector general of Kashmir police. He identified the dead Israeli as Erez Kahane.

It was the first time a foreigner has been killed in Kashmir since a separatist Muslim insurgency escalated 18 months ago. Two Swedish engineers were kidnaped in March and are still being held by Muslim militants who demand the release of several jailed colleagues.

Srinagar is the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only state with a Muslim majority. Nationwide, Muslims make up 12% of India’s 844 million people.

The six Israeli men and two women were kidnaped Wednesday night from the “Garden of Heaven” houseboat on Dal Lake, authorities said. The women, an Israeli and a Dutch woman, were released by their captors soon after being taken.

The militants then took the Israeli men to a house in downtown Srinagar, where they were bound and questioned, police quoted one of the Israelis, Haggai Caspi, as saying.

Eventually, Caspi was able to untie himself, and “he managed, quietly, to untie the others’ hands also,” the Indian official said on condition of anonymity.

In the ensuing struggle and shooting, five of the Israelis managed to escape to a nearby house. They were eventually rescued in the morning, police said.

Srinagar police said the Indian government evacuated about 70 foreign tourists, including an unknown number of Israelis, from the region on Thursday. Israeli Consul Giora Becher said more than 50 Israeli tourists had been in the strife-torn region at the time.