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SRINAGAR, July 6: At least 17 people, most of them freedom fighters, have died in the latest round of violence in occupied Kashmir, police said on Tuesday.
A police statement on Tuesday said that Indian troops shot dead five mujahideen along the border, over the past two days.
Elsewhere in occupied Kashmir, police said three Mujahideen and an Indian army soldier were killed in an encounter near Kupwara district. An elderly Kashmiri man and a young woman died in the crossfire between Mujahideen and Indian troops in southern Anantnag and Kathua districts, police said.
In another operation, Indian troops shot dead five freedom fighters in the districts of Anantnag, Baramulla, Doda and Poonch late on Monday, the police statement said. Police also blamed Mujahideen for the killing a civilian in Baramulla after abducting him from his house overnight.
PROTEST: Shops and businesses remained shut here on Tuesday as residents observed a one-day strike called to protest the gutting of the region's oldest school. Police and paramilitary forces were deployed in strength throughout Srinagar to prevent any "law and order" problems, a police officer said.
The 115-year-old Islamia Higher Secondary School was destroyed on Monday by a pre-dawn fire which whipped through the brick-and-wood structure, witnesses said. Police have yet to state the cause of the fire but Kashmiri leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, whose great great-uncle Maulana Rasool Shah established the school, claimed the building was deliberately torched. -AFP
