SRINAGAR: Government forces in India-held Kashmir fired shotgun pellets andtear gas at hundreds of mourners on Saturday during a funeral march for aman, Qaiser Amin Bhat, killed after he was run over by a paramilitaryvehicle during a protest.
Bhat was critically injured on Friday and died overnight in a hospitalafter a paramilitary armoured vehicle crushed at least two men during ananti-India protest.
The angry mourners were marching with the man’s body to a graveyard inSrinagar on Saturday when police and soldiers used force to stop them.Police said the marchers were defying a government order that bans assemblyof more than four people in the city.
Residents said youths from the funeral regrouped in the winding streets ofthe city’s downtown and threw stones at troops while chanting slogans infavour of separatists and demanding an end to Indian rule over the disputedregion. Fierce clashes broke out in several places in the city.
Police later took the custody of the body and said they would allow only ahandful of relatives to take the body for burial in the city’s mainmartyr’s graveyard where hundreds of separatists and civilians killed areburied.
When hundreds of residents showed up, witnesses said police again firedtear gas into the mourners. That set off pitched battles between residentsand government forces. At least a dozen people were injured in the day’sclashes.
Armed police and paramilitary soldiers laid razor wire and steel barricadesat roads and enforced a curfew in old parts of Srinagar to restrictparticipation in the funeral.
Authorities cut mobile internet services in Srinagar, and reducedconnection speeds in other parts of the Kashmir Valley, a common governmentpractice to prevent anti-India demonstrations from being organised.
Shops, businesses and schools remained closed in the region on Saturday asseparatists had already called for a strike to protest Indian rule.
Friday’s incident was the second of its kind in recent weeks. Last month, ayoung man was killed when a police armoured vehicle ran over him duringclashes with government forces in Srinagar.
Residents said the armoured vehicle in Friday’s incident drove wildly intoa crowd of anti-India protesters, slamming into a half-dozen people andcrushing at least two men beneath its wheels, injuring them critically.
An *AP* photographer captured the horror in a series of photographs of theother injured man, who doctors say is still in critical condition.
Indian officials blamed the protesters and said the crowd was trying todrag the soldiers from their vehicle.
Police, however, said the incident was a mistake by the nervous driver andon Saturday registered a case against him for “rash and negligent driving”.
Police also said they were registering cases of attempted murder against anunspecified number of protesters who attacked the vehicle.
Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan territorydivided between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan but claimed by bothin its entirety. In recent years, the India-held portion has seen renewedmilitant attacks and repeated public protests against Indian rule.