Explosions kill 5 in Indian-controlled Kashmir

September 24, 2000
Web posted at: 7:06 AM HKT (2306 GMT)

JAMMU, India (Reuters) -- Five people were killed and two others injured in two powerful bomb blasts in India's strife-ridden state of Jammu and Kashmir on Saturday, police said.

The bombs rocked the Sangaldan area in Udhampur district, 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Jammu, the state's winter capital, a police official said.

"The first bomb exploded in a shop belonging to a Hindu at seven in the morning killing five civilians, including the shopkeeper, on the spot, followed by another blast, 200 meters away from the first one, at 10 a.m. injuring two," he said.

Eight separatists were killed in three different incidents of insurgency-related violence in the state's border district of Poonch on Friday.

Separatist violence has surged in the region after a frontline Kashmiri separatist group, Hizbul Mujahideen, called off a brief unilateral cease fire last month.

India, which controls 45 percent of the Kashmir region, accuses Pakistan of arming and training Kashmiri separatists, a charge Islamabad denies.

Pakistan rules a third of Kashmir and China the rest.

Nearly a dozen militant groups are fighting New Delhi's rule in Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, where police and hospitals say more than 30,000 people have been killed in a decade of separatist violence.

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