SRINAGAR, Nov 11: Twenty-eight people including 17 Mujahideen have been killed in the past 24 hours in Kashmir, police said on Sunday.

They said Indian security forces shot dead 11 guerillasin two gun battles on Sundayin the state’s Poonch district, 480 kms southwest of Srinagar.

“Both gun battles were continuing when last reports came in,” a police spokesman said.

In another incident, eight people — seven mujahideen and one civilian — were killed near Surankote in the same district, police said.

Earlier on Saturday evening, three policemen were killed when guerillas attacked a patrol at Tral, south of Srinagar.

Witnesses said angry policemen retaliated and torched nearly 40 shops and other buildings in the township.

A 10-year-old boy died in the blaze, they said.

“They (policemen) fired indiscriminately and set ablaze shops in the area,” Rashid Ahmad, a resident of Tral said.

A police spokesman denied the charge and said the shops caught fire in the fighting between mujahideen and policemen.

“The fire broke out during the encounter between militants and policemen. We don’t know yet if any civilian died due to bullet injuries,” he said.

A frontline mujahideen group on Sunday claimed responsibility for the attack in Tral and said it had killed four police, not three as the authorities claimed.

“Our mujahideen attacked the SOG patrol at Tral and killed four policemen. Mujahideen also took away four rifles from the spot,” a spokesman of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen told newspaper offices in Srinagar.

SOG or Special Operations Group is the counter insurgency arm of Jammu and Kashmir police.

Elsewhere, four activists and a civilian were killed in separate shootouts in the Himalayan region. —Reuters