SRINAGAR, Oct 17: Mujahideen launched a brazen attack on Friday near the home of occupied Kashmir’s chief minister, hurling grenades and firing automatic weapons in an assault that left two soldiers dead and nine security personnel hurt, officials said.

Mujahideen groups claiming responsibility for the attack said the target was Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s house but that the attackers had become confused and attacked the wrong target.

Government officials said the chief minister’s house was too heavily guarded to be susceptible to attack.

By nightfall, at least two Mujahideen — the number was uncertain — were still holed up in the Ali Jaan shopping complex near the chief minister’s house in the heart of Srinagar, where they took refuge after the initial attack mid-morning.

In the latest bursts of gunfire and grenade lobbing a superintendent of police and his deputy were injured, senior BSF officer Rajinder Bhullar told reporters at the scene on Friday evening.

He said all the civilians trapped inside the building had been brought out safely and reunited with their relatives.

“We are in control of three storeys and are searching for the militants inside. We will soon neutralize them,” Mr Bhullar said.

Director General of Police (DGP) Gopal Sharma earlier said two or three freedom fighters launched a grenade attack on a BSF patrol near the chief minister’s house in the morning and then fled to the shopping complex about 30 metres away.

Witnesses said the area was rocked by two loud explosions followed by gunfire, which sent residents fleeing and forced panicked shopkeepers to close their shutters.

After the Mujahideen had taken positions in the complex, BSF personnel engaged them in a lengthy gunbattle interspersed with grenade attacks. The freedom fighters retaliated in kind.

In the initial attack, two BSF soldiers were killed and an officer was injured. Four policemen, including two officers and three BSF personnel and their officer were hurt in the later firefights.

Mr Sayeed was not in his home at the time of the blasts, having left early in the morning for an official function in Lucknow and Aligarh, the state information department said.

However, his wife, daughter Mehbooba Mufti, who is president of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, and her two daughters were at home.

“The attack took place on a road on which also has the chief minister’s residence. It was not on his house. There was no danger to his house,” Mr Sharma said in a television interview.

“They (the militants) could not have reached the chief minister’s residence as there was a lot of security there,” another police officer, Mohammed Amin Shah, told AFP.

But three Kashmiri groups, al Mansorain, Farzandan-i-Millat and al Nasereen, which all claimed responsibility, said the attack was indeed on the chief minister’s home.

“Our target was chief minister’s residence, but the two gunmen who launched the attack stormed into a wrong building,” a spokesman for Al Mansoorain, Abu Shakir, told a local news agency Current News Service.—AFP