SRINAGAR, Oct 5: Ten people, including seven policemen and two militants, were killed in a 26-hour gunbattle as security forces fought gunmen holed up in a hotel in the heart of the city, police said on Thursday.

At least 12 people were wounded, eight of them police officers, in the stand-off which began when a group of militants lobbed a grenade at a security camp and then entered a hotel opposite and began firing at the base on Wednesday.

“The operation is over now (but) we are still searching the area for abandoned ammunition and explosives,” Gopal Sharma, director-general of police for Jammu and Kashmir state, told reporters near the site of the encounter.

The militant group Al-Mansurian said a three-member suicide squad attacked the camp, which lies close to a congested residential area of Srinagar, summer capital of the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The group said they had killed 11 policemen and that one of their members had escaped.

“One of our mujahid has returned to base and two were martyred in the attack. Our mujahideen killed at least 11 policemen,” a caller, identifying himself as an Al-Mansurian spokesman, told newspapers.

The attack is the most serious in recent months in Srinagar, which has seen almost daily street protests over the past week after a Delhi court fixed Oct 20 as the date for hanging a Kashmiri man convicted for a 2001 attack on India’s parliament.—Reuters