10 killed in Indian border shootout
Print Edition
TEN people, including three civilians, were killed yesterday when gunmen wearing army uniforms stormed a police station in northern India near the border with Pakistan, sparking a shootout lasting almost 11 hours.
Police said three attackers had been killed in the battle with security forces that began in the early hours yesterday and terrified local residents.
Four police officers, including the local superintendent, also died in the operation in the usually calm northern state of Punjab.
“The police superintendent fought them bravely but unfortunately he was shot in the head and he died on the spot,” said Anand Kumar, part of the special forces team that entered the building.
The assault only ended at around 5pm when security forces finally entered the police station where the unidentified gunmen had been holed up.
One civilian was killed when the attackers opened fire at a bus station while the other two died at the police station, said Sumedh Singh Saini, director general of police for Punjab.
He told reporters it was “too early to say” who the attackers were.
Five live bombs were recovered from nearby railway tracks, forcing train services to be canceled.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh said he had ordered increased security on the border with Pakistan, which condemned the assault in a statement, pushing back against suggestions by some Indian security sources that the assailants had crossed from Pakistani territory.
A number of other states were also said to be on high alert.
It was the first major attack in India’s Punjab for more than a decade and the state’s Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal blamed a lack of security on the border.
“This militancy is a national problem, not a state problem, so it needs to be tackled with a national policy,” he said.
“If prior intelligence input had been given, they should have properly sealed the borders.”
Insurgents frequently target police in the volatile Kashmir region, which is divided between arch rivals India and Pakistan and claimed in full by both.
But neighboring Punjab, a majority-Sikh state, has largely been spared the violence that has plagued Indian Kashmir.
An armed rebellion for a separate Sikh homeland erupted in Punjab in 1983 but waned in the early 1990s.
About 50,000 people died in that conflict, which India blamed at the time on Pakistan.
Some media reports suggested the attackers behind the assault in Gurdaspur may have crossed into Punjab from Kashmir.
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