JAMMU, May 14: Thirty-three people, most of them civilians, were killed on Tuesday when three unidentified men opened fire on a passenger bus in occupied Jammu and then stormed the residential quarters of a nearby Indian army camp.

Twenty-three people, 18 of them women and children, were killed at the army camp, along with seven bus passengers and the three assailants, Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani said in New Delhi.

The attack, the deadliest on the Indian army in occupied Kashmir in the past year, came just hours after US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca arrived in New Delhi to urge the Indian leadership to cool tempers with Pakistan.

“Events like this will ensure that restraint (by India) will not last,” junior foreign minister Omar Abdullah told reporters.

Rocca said Washington “unequivocally” denounced the attack. “It is precisely this type of barbaric terrorism that the international war on terrorism is determined to stop,” she said.

A little-known group, called al-Mansoorain, claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack in a telephone call to the NAFA news agency in Srinagar.

However, Advani told parliament that the Lashkar-i-Taiba and the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen had both claimed responsibility for the killings. A Jamiat spokesman denied the charge in a telephone call.

The gunmen in Tuesday’s attack had boarded a bus from Himachal Pradesh state en route to held Jammu.

“At 6.10am (6.40am PST), they opened indiscriminate fire in the bus and lobbed a grenade,” said Major General Mohan Pandey, who commands the 26th infantry.

Seven bus passengers, four of them women, were killed in the bloodbath at Kaluchak, some 15kms south of Jammu, he said.

A guard at a nearby army camp spotted the three attackers as they ran out of the bus and opened fire on them. One was killed, but the others sneaked into the army camp’s residential quarter, where they began shooting at soldiers’ family members, officials said.

“Some of them bolted their doors from inside, but the militants tried to open the doors and were shooting at the family members,” Pandey said.

The army retaliated by firing rockets at a nearby house where the assailants were believed to have taken refuge. The operation was over by 10am (10.30am PST), with all three gunmen dead, Pandey said.—AFP