Official, Four Others Slain in Kashmir

A minister in the strife-torn Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and four other people were killed Monday when a bomb planted by guerrillas blew up the official’s car, police said.

It was the first killing of a government minister in Kashmir since an armed revolt broke out in the Himalayan region in 1990.

Junior power minister Ghulam Hassan Bhatt died when his car drove over the bomb in the village of Dooru in Anantnag district, 45 miles south of the state’s summer capital, Srinagar, a senior police official said.

The others killed were the minister’s bodyguard, a police constable, the driver and a civilian.

Hizbul Moujahedeen, a Kashmiri separatist group fighting for unification with neighboring Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the blast.

“Our moujahedeen [holy warriors] detonated a land mine which killed the minister and his bodyguards,” a spokesman for the group said by telephone in Srinagar.

The group has threatened more violence if Indian authorities do not stop alleged human rights abuses in Kashmir.

“The next target will be Kashmir’s chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, and senior army officer and installations,” it warned.

Separatist militants have made several attempts to kill Kashmiri ministers, who are mostly members of Jammu and Kashmir’s ruling National Conference party.

Abdullah said the killing was a “dastardly act of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists” who were “picking up soft targets to quench their thirst for blood.”

“Killing of political leaders and workers will not deter us from our chosen path to crush trans-border terrorism in the state,” a government statement quoted the chief minister as saying.

According to a government document, more than 205 National Conference activists, including some former ministers and legislators, have been killed since the insurgency began.

Nearly a dozen militant groups are fighting New Delhi’s rule in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, where police and hospitals say more than 30,000 people have been killed in a decade of separatist rebellion.

Pakistan denies Indian charges that it arms Kashmiri separatists, but it acknowledges moral and political support for them.