An Indian army soldier takes position during a fight in the town of Dinanagar, in the northern state of Punjab
Indian forces fought a prolonged gunfight yesterday with militants who attacked a moving bus and stormed into a police station in a northern town bordering Pakistan, with at least nine people killed in the violence, officials said.
The attackers killed at least seven people — civilians and policemen — in the pre-dawn attack in Punjab state, said Harcharan Singh Bains, a state government spokesman.
Two of the attackers, numbering three or four in all, were killed in ongoing fighting with Indian forces that had lasted more than 10 hours as of late yesterday afternoon, Bains said.
Senior police officer Dinkar Gupta said the attackers hijacked a car and then fired at the bus and a roadside eatery before entering a police station near Gurdaspur, a border town in Punjab that was put on a maximum alert.
Eight injured people were hospitalized, seven of them in serious condition, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Police are investigating whether the militants came from the Indian portion of Kashmir — which borders Punjab — or from Pakistan after crossing the land border. Rebels routinely stage attacks in Indian-held Kashmir, where they’ve been fighting since 1989 for an independent Kashmir or its merger with Pakistan.
Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar said army commandos had joined the police operations in Dinanagar, a small town in Gurdaspur district located 450 kilometers north of New Delhi.
State-run All India Radio said that police had discovered five bombs on a railway track in the area, causing train service to be suspended, though it was unclear whether it was related to the attack. Ashok Sharma, New Delhi, AP
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