Gunmen Kill 3 Police Officers in Srinagar, India

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/world/asia/srinagar-india-police-killing.html

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NEW DELHI — Three police officers were killed by gunmen in two separate shootings on Monday in Srinagar, India, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir State, the police said.

Attacks on police and army officials have become relatively rare in Srinagar, and more often take place outside the city or closer to the disputed border with Pakistan. A once-steady stream of armed militants crossing the border has also declined in recent years.

Kashmir has been a source of conflict between Pakistan and India since independence and partition in 1947. Pakistan has never accepted the state’s inclusion in India and has tried repeatedly to dislodge it, both with military incursions and by supporting Kashmiri insurgents.

In Monday’s attacks, attackers suspected of being militants fatally shot the police officers at close range at two separate locations.

The militant separatist group Hizbul Mujahedeen took responsibility for the killings in the local news media, though there was no official confirmation of the group’s involvement.

The attacks followed a weekend gun battle in which five people suspected of being militants were killed by the Indian Army in the border district of Kupwara, said Col. N. N. Joshi, a military spokesman in Srinagar. On Sunday, an Indian soldier died of his wounds.

India and Pakistan regularly accuse each other of sponsoring terrorism in their respective countries, and the Indian Army said in a news conference that it believed the men involved in the weekend gun battle were from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned Pakistan-based militant group that wants to end Indian control of Jammu and Kashmir.