SRINAGAR: Suspected militants killed two policemen outside a court in Indian-administered Kashmir on Monday, hours after another officer was stabbed in a separate incident in the restive region, police said.

“Two policemen died in the shooting by militants on a truck outside the court complex,” police superintendent Tejinder Singh told AFP.

The firing took place in Pulwama town, 30 kilometres (18.6 miles) south of the region's main city of Srinagar, as a group of police arrived to deliver food to colleagues on duty at the court, a police officer said.

Earlier, a police officer was stabbed and critically injured in a marketplace in the nearby town of Pampore by an unknown assailant who was overpowered and arrested as he tried to flee.

“He stabbed the policeman in the neck and tried to snatch his weapon. He is a close relative of an active Hizbul Mujahideen militant,” another police officer Pervez Ahmed said.

About a dozen rebel groups have been fighting Indian forces since 1989 for independence or merger of the disputed territory with Pakistan. The fighting has left tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, dead.

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan but has been claimed by both in full since the two won independence from Britain in 1947.

Last week Indian security forces killed six suspected rebels in the remote frontier area of Kupwara near the de facto border with Pakistan known as Line of Control (LoC).

The killings triggered protests in the area as locals suspected the slain rebels to be unknown civilians. But police later said investigations established that all six were militants from Pakistan-administered Kashmir who had crossed the LoC last summer.