Two Islamic separatists and at least two others were killed as a 48-hour standoff between the militants and Indian forces in the Indian part of Kashmir ended on Thursday, according to news reports.
The conflict began on Tuesday when the two militants stormed a police station in the city Srinagar, one of the region’s capitals. The members of the Al-Mansurin rebel group had planned to detonate themselves, according to AFP.
The siege came after India transferred control of rebel activity from paramilitary forces to the police.
The Indian region in Kashmir is the only part of the country with a majority Muslim population. The mountainous region was divided in 1947 in the partition of India and Pakistan and has been plagued by violence since.
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Also on Thursday, Pakistan banned three Islamic organizations for their perpetration of religious hatred and radical politics, according to the BBC.
Earlier the same day, two suicide car bombs exploded near the London-based HSBC bank and the British consulate in Istanbul, killing at least 25 people, including Roger Short, the consul general. [Further details here [2]] Al-Qa’ida and Turkish Islamic group IBDA are believed to be responsible.
At about the same time, a suicide car bomb claimed civilian lives near the headquarters of a Kurdish political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. The party’s leader heads the U.S.-appointed Iraqi governing council.
The number of reported dead varied among news sources; the New York Times claimed 12, while the BBC reported four. No one had claimed responsibility at publication time.
A security guard was killed in a shooting attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the New York Times reported. Another car bomb targeting a U.S.-appointed administrative body in western Iraq was reported by the same publication.
U.S. forces attacked members of an ambush directed at a civilian convoy in north-central Iraq on Wednesday, killing 10, CNN reported.