SRINAGAR, Oct 20: Thousands of angry Kashmiri villagers torched government vehicles in street battles that injured 30 police after army soldiers allegedly shot dead a schoolteacher in occupied Kashmir, officials and villagers said on Saturday.

Rawathpora village residents claimed that Indian soldiers detained teacher Abdul Rashid Mir, 26, outside a school on Friday, then tortured and fatally shot him while he was in custody.

The Indian army said Mir was accidentally shot after he got into a squabble with an army patrol team on Friday. It said it regretted the incident, but called the villagers’ allegations “baseless.”

Rawathpora is 115 kilometres north of Srinagar.

Mir’s neighbour Latief Ahmed said soldiers, led by an army major, had picked Mir up near the government school where Mir taught, then taken the teacher away and shot him dead.

An army spokesman, Col Majinder Singh, said Mir “was killed as a soldier on patrol duty accidentally pulled the trigger and the bullet hit him during an identification check.”

Police have registered a case over the killing against a major and one other soldier, said top local police official Vijay Kumar.

Sentiments against predominantly Hindu India run deep in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, a Himalayan territory split between India and neighbouring Pakistan but claimed in full by both.

Separatists have been fighting since 1989 for independence from India or merger with Pakistan.—AP