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Police fire on angry Kashmir marchers
Los Angeles Times - June 10, 2009
Mark Magnier, New Delhi – Police opened fire on protesters in Indian Kashmir, wounding at least four, after a week of escalating demonstrations over the deaths late last month of two young women.
Locals have accused troops or paramilitary forces of raping and killing the women, part of what they say is a pattern of sexual violence used to intimidate and humiliate civilians. Military leaders have branded the accusations as slander.
The protests followed the release of a police forensic report on Sunday that indicated the women had been raped, despite initial government denials. But the report stopped short of giving a cause of death.
In the past week there has been a general strike, the suspension of rail services, the detention of a prominent political leader and at least 400 demonstrators injured and one killed.
Monday's protest was the largest so far, with 15,000 people marching towards Shopian, where the bodies were found, despite a police lockdown.
Wasim Khalid, a reporter with the Rising Kashmir newspaper, said that as the protesters neared the town, police opened fire. At least four or five people were wounded, one or two of them critically, Khalid said. Other media reports said at least seven were injured in the shooting.
D.K. Pathak, an inspector-general of the Central Reserve Police Force, a paramilitary unit, said a curfew or lockdown by security forces was necessary because of people disobeying the law.
Residents in Kashmir have often been antagonised by heavy-handed security during the Indian Government's decades-long fight against separatists and insurgents infiltrating from the Pakistan side of the disputed region.
India and Pakistan have waged two wars over Kashmir and have had several near misses since they split in 1947.
Anti-Indian sentiment is strong in much of Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided but claimed in its entirety by both.
The latest round of protests were sparked by the discovery of the Muslim women's bodies in a riverbed. The two, a 17-year-old single girl and her 22-year-old sister-in-law, had gone for an evening walk to a nearby orchard but never returned.
Kashmir's top elected official, the Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, said in a news conference on June 1 that an autopsy and initial investigation did not find evidence of rape or murder.
Under growing pressure, police issued their own forensic report, which found that both women had been raped.
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