Indian Kashmir largely shut down on Monday and hundreds of police were deployed in the troubled region’s main city after the weekend shooting of two civilians by the army, a police chief said.
The shutdown to protest against the shootings came as a police officer and a militant were killed in a separate incident south of the main city Srinagar, said Kashmir’s police chief Abdul Gani Mir.
The officer and the rebel died in the village of Mandoora, 35kilometres from Srinagar, during a gun battle that also wounded three soldiers, the police chief said.
“We launched an operation based on intelligence of the presence of militants in the area,” Mir said.
In Srinagar shops and other businesses, along with schools, were closed and traffic was light after a separatist group called for a strike in the region to protest at the weekend killings.
The region was tense after the weekend shootings in which soldiers opened fire on angry villagers, killing one. The villagers had been protesting the shooting of a teenager by the military just hours earlier during a hunt for militants in Markondal village north of Srinagar.
Hundreds of police and paramilitary troops were deployed in the inner parts of Srinagar on Monday to try to prevent protests, while a curfew was imposed on parts of the region.
Despite the curfew, hundreds of villagers in the northern town of Hajin took to the streets, shouting anti-India slogans, while some tried to torch an army-run school.
Police have launched an investigation into the weekend shootings. The army has started its own probe, after describing both incidents as regrettable.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan by a UN-monitored Line of Control. Both countries claim the Himalayan territory in full.
In a separate incident, Indian soldiers shot and killed a man at Saujaya in Poonch region who may have been carrying explosives from across the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, an army spokesman said.
About a dozen armed groups have been fighting Indian forces since 1989 for Kashmir’s independence or for its merger with Pakistan.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting.