Gunmen kill eight workers in Kashmir

INDIA: Gunmen in army uniforms surrounded a group of laborers in a remote Kashmir village on Monday and shot them, killing eight and wounding at least seven others, police said.

Meanwhile, a teenager and two police officers were killed in separate incidents in the Himalayan region, where Hindu-Muslim tensions have long festered alongside an Islamic insurgency.

Sixteen laborers were working in a field near Badru village when four men dressed in army uniforms walked up to them and began firing, said H.K. Lohia, a deputy inspector general of police. "The workers fled, but not before eight of them were killed instantly, and the rest were wounded," Lohia said. "One man escaped by playing dead."

All of those killed were Hindus, most from the eastern state of Bihar, Lohia said. No rebel group immediately took responsibility for the attack, but Lohia blamed it on Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, one of more than a dozen Islamic militant groups fighting to wrest Muslim-majority Kashmir from predominantly Hindu India.

About 67,000 people have been killed in the 16-year insurgency. Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, which both claim the entire territory and have fought two wars over it since their independence from Britain in 1947.

After the attack, paramilitary soldiers cordoned off the village and were searching for the rebels, Lohia said. In the nearby village of Yaripura, the lone man who escaped, Naimuddin, said he and his colleagues had been at work in the field when they saw four men approaching.

"From a distance they looked like soldiers, so we ignored them and kept working," said Naimuddin, who uses only one name. "Suddenly they began to fire at us. We started running but I could see some of my colleagues had fallen to the ground."

Naimuddin said he escaped by lying face down and pretending to be dead until police arrived. "I escaped by a miracle," a badly shaken Naimuddin told the Associated Press from the Yaripura hospital, eight kilometers (five miles) from the attack site.

Srinagar, Tuesday, AP