Agencies/Srinagar

Suspected militants shot and killed a paramilitary soldier and critically wounded another yesterday in a busy market in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar, police said.
The rebels, armed with a pistol, shot the soldiers from the Central Industrial Security Force while they were buying vegetables outside the Naaz cinema situated less than a kilometre from city centre Lal Chowk, a senior police officer said.
“One of them died on the spot and the other is hospitalised with critical injuries,” the city’s police chief Ashiq Bukhari said.
Panic gripped the area with shopkeepers and pedestrians running for cover.
About a dozen rebel groups have been fighting Indian forces since 1989 for independence or merger with Pakistan of the Himalayan region.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting.
Naaz cinema shut down in the beginning of 1990.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan by a heavily militarised Line of Control (LoC) since the two countries won independence from Britain in 1947.
Overall militant violence has declined in Kashmir since India and Pakistan began a peace process in 2004, and attacks in Srinagar itself are rare now.
But there have been intermittent shoot and run incidents involving police and suspected militants.
No rebel group immediately claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack.
In July suspected rebels in Srinagar lobbed a grenade at a police vehicle carrying a prisoner who later died in a hospital.
Militants also killed eight soldiers during an ambush on the outskirts of Srinagar, the deadliest such attack in five years, marring a landmark visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
In a separate incident yesterday morning, the army said it had killed a militant who was trying to infiltrate the forested Machil area, 140km northwest of Srinagar.
“He (the militant) fired on being challenged and was killed in the ensuing gunfight,” Colonel Brijesh Pandey said.
The militant’s body was found in the heavily forested area 2km inside the LoC, along with an AK47 assault rifle, Pandey said.