Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti lays a wreath on the coffin of a police officer during a ceremony in Srinagar yesterday after an attack by suspected militants.
Suspected militants yesterday gunned down three police officers in separate attacks in Srinagar, the main city Jammu and Kashmir.
Deadly attacks on security forces are relatively common in the state, but Srinagar has been largely free from such incidents in recent years.
Police said two officers were shot dead while patrolling in the old part of the city.
A third was shot dead in a business district less than an hour later.
“Three cops were killed in two different militant attacks,” senior officer Ghulam Hassan Bhat said in Srinagar.
The militant group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen claimed the attacks, but there was no official confirmation it was responsible.
Authorities said they were tightening security in already heavily militarised Srinagar in the wake of the attacks.
The last major assault on security forces in Srinagar was in June 2013, when suspected militants attacked an army convoy and killed eight soldiers the day before a visit by then prime minister Manmohan Singh.
Last year the city saw a series of grenade attacks on telecom company offices and paramilitary troop installations.
The spike in violence comes against a backdrop of rising social tension and separatist sentiment in the Muslim-majority state.
The number of militants sneaking across the defacto border between India and Pakistan has increased this year, helped by an early summer and a lack of winter snows in the mountainous region, a senior army officer said.
