| Large bowls of warm milk snipped from this story. I hope PM Singh knows what he's doing; the fact that his army had to kill two assassins before his speech in Kashmir and that he had to give his "Let's be friends" speech from behind bulletproof glass might indicate that now is not the time to pull your troops home. Unless you really don't *want* Kashmir. |
Just hours before Singh landed in Srinagar, Indian soldiers fought a gunbattle with two rebels who had been holed up since late Tuesday in a run-down building overlooking the stadium.
Television footage showed dramatic pictures of flak-jacketed troops firing from behind armored vehicles and running forward to get to better firing positions. The militants, equipped with AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and grenades, later climbed a nearby hill and took cover in a semi-constructed building from where they fired intermittently. Soldiers later surrounded the building and shot the men dead. Troops then clambered onto the building looking for booby traps and scoured the hillside to ensure that there were no more guerrillas hiding nearby. "We consider it as a major success because we were able to detect them and eliminate them before the PM's program," said Ranjit Singh, a police inspector general. "If not, they could have caused major havoc." Two soldiers and a civilian were wounded. Earlier, about 1,000 Indian soldiers withdrew from a southern Kashmiri town as part of a highly publicized move to scale back some forces in the Himalayan region. "If conditions improve and if the incidence of infiltration and of violence remain under control, it will make it easier for me to seek a further reduction of troops," Singh said.
But a pro-Pakistan Kashmiri guerrilla leader said the withdrawal was staged to divert attention from Indian army abuses. "The mujahideen and Kashmiris are not fighting just for troop reduction. We took up guns for a complete withdrawal," said Syed Salahuddin, commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen guerrilla group.