SRINAGAR, India: Thousands of villagers attacked police with rocks in the Indian portion of Kashmir on Monday as protests against the killing of four people by government forces continued for a fifth day.
At least 12 policemen and eight civilians were injured in clashes as police used tear gas and bamboo sticks to disperse the protesters in Kupwara, a town 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, said Vijay Kumar, the senior superintendent of police.
Local residents say Irshad Ahmed, a 27-year-old man from a nearby village Putoshahi, was killed by police in a fake gunbattle.
Authorities say Ahmed and two other still-unidentified men were militants with ties to rebel groups and were killed in a gunbattle Thursday close to the headquarters of the army's infantry unit in Kupwara.
A fourth person, a female schoolteacher, was killed in the crossfire, police said.
The protesters say police arrested the three youths, brought them to the area and later killed them.
On Monday, Bashir Ahmed, president of a local lawyers' group, demanded an investigation.
"It was a fake gunbattle. The woman was fatally shot because she was a witness to the killings by government forces," Ahmed said. Police deny the charge.
Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, where nearly a dozen rebel groups have been fighting since 1989 for independence from mainly Hindu India or for merger with Muslim Pakistan.
Government forces are often accused of killing and torturing people they suspect to be tied to the militants. Authorities routinely investigate such allegations, but rarely prosecute those involved in the deaths.
More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have died in the conflict. Kashmir is split between India and Pakistan and both claim it in its entirety.
