Kashmir Militants Kill 35 Hindus

Islamic militants have killed 35 members of Kashmir’s Hindu minority, police said Monday, days ahead of a planned meeting between the divided region’s political separatists and India’s prime minister.

In one village, militants disguised as soldiers coaxed residents from their homes and then gunned down 22 of them -- the single deadliest attack by Islamic rebels in Kashmir since a 2003 cease-fire between India and Pakistan, police said.

Separately, 13 shepherds were abducted over the weekend in the Udhampur district. Four were found dead Sunday and the bodies of the nine others were discovered Monday, said a senior police officer, Rajesh Singh.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh suggested that the village attack would not hamper efforts to find peace in the Himalayan region, saying, “People of Kashmir have rejected and rebuffed terrorists repeatedly.”

India has repeatedly accused Pakistan of backing the militants, even as the two rivals have talked peace. Singh, however, stopped short of blaming Islamabad for the attack.

A spokeswoman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Tasnim Aslam, said the killings were “an act of terrorism and we condemn it.”

Witnesses said more than half a dozen assailants, some in army uniforms, slipped into the village of Thava after dark Sunday and, using local guides, told people they had come to meet with residents.

“When we assembled outside the home of the village head ... they showered bullets on us,” said Gyan Chand, one of five people wounded in the attack.

Chand spoke from a hospital in the town of Doda, near Thava, about 380 miles north of New Delhi, the capital.

For centuries, Kashmir’s Hindus -- known as Pandits -- lived peacefully alongside the region’s Muslim majority.

But the Pandits have been targeted by Islamic insurgents who have been fighting since 1989 to wrest the Indian-held portion of Kashmir from that largely Hindu nation.

A leader of Kashmir’s political separatist movement, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, called the attack in Thava “a deplorable and heinous act.”

His group, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, expects to take part in a meeting Wednesday between Kashmiri political separatists and the prime minister.

“I hope we are able to find a way out of this mindless death and destruction,” Farooq said.