Gun Battle Leaves 9 Dead in Kashmir

Suspected Islamic militants attacked an Indian army convoy in Kashmir on Saturday, killing a soldier and sparking a gun battle that left five civilians, two attackers and a policeman dead, officials said.

Hospital officials said 23 civilians and seven soldiers were wounded.

The attackers fired machine guns and threw grenades at the convoy of trucks on a road in Baramullah, 40 miles north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state.

Soldiers fired back indiscriminately, witnesses said, and the Press Trust of India reported that a gun battle raged through the town for an hour.

“People started closing their shutters. We saw soldiers firing,” Manzoor Ahmed Mir, a shopkeeper in Baramullah, said by telephone. “We ducked to save our lives.”

Police said they suspected that the attackers were members of one of several Islamic militant groups that have been fighting to separate mostly Muslim Kashmir from Hindu-majority India since 1989.

Officials said they did not know how many men attacked the convoy.

India accuses neighboring Pakistan of training and arming the rebels, a charge denied by Pakistan, which says it gives them only moral support and has no control over their actions in Kashmir.

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, but both claim the Himalayan region in its entirety, and they have fought two wars over it since 1947.