Around 25 people were injured in a grenade attack on an election rally in Kashmir on Wednesday by suspected Islamic rebels ahead of a visit to the restive region by India’s prime minister, police said. People were gathering at the rally site, in Indian Kashmir’s Banihal town, when the grenade attack took place. The rally was to be addressed by senior leader of India’s main opposition Congress party Lal Singh, who is also Indian Kashmir’s health minister. Banihal is about 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of the region’s winter capital Jammu, where Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was due to hold an election rally later Wednesday.
The attack came just hours after Indian troops shot dead a senior rebel commander of a hardline group they claimed was behind a string of recent attacks on election rallies in the divided state. The killed rebel commander, meanwhile, was named by Indian army brigadier A.K. Choudhary as Pakistani national Abu Kasha. Choudhary said Kasha, a senior member of pro-Pakistan Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, was killed in a gunfight with troops on the outskirts of the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar early Wednesday. He said Kasha has been operating from Jammu and had recently been sent to the Kashmir valley to target important political leaders and disrupt election rallies.
| I'm sorry, but I read that and immediately slipped languages, translating "Kasha" from Russian. I now think of the deceased as "Pappy Buckwheat"... |
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