SRINAGAR, Nov 8: Twelve people died in separatist violence in Kashmir, where two Nepalese porters were killed by shelling between Indian and Pakistani forces over the Line of Control (LoC), police said on Saturday.

Freedom fighters gunned down Abdul Majid Rather, a local leader of India’s main opposition Congress party, as he came home from a mosque in Wagoora village of the northern Baramulla district, police said.

Rather is the fourth activist of a pro-India party to be killed in a week. Two of the other victims belonged to Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party, which rules in an alliance with Congress.

Police said suspected rebels overnight killed four Muslim civilians, including two women, in separate incidents. The motives for the killings were not immediately clear.

Indian troops shot dead six rebels in three clashes across the Himalayan province, police said. In the southern Doda district, rebels opened fire on an army patrol on Saturday, killing one soldier and injuring three others.

Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged fire intermittently throughout the night over the LoC in the Batalik sector of the northeastern Ladakh region, a police spokesman said.

He claimed that Pakistani shells killed two Nepalese porters working for the Indian army, injured a civilian and damaged two houses.

Batalik was one of the four northeastern sectors where the Indian army fought a pitched two-month battle with freedom fighters in 1999. More than 1,000 people died on both sides.—AFP