By Shazia Yousuf
SRINAGAR, Indian-held Kashmir
A landmine blast killed three people and injured one other person in Indian-held Kashmir's Jammu district Saturday, police said.
“It was an anti-tank mine blast in Jhanjer village in Nowshera sector that took the lives of three people at around nine in the morning,” senior Indian police officer Haseeb Mughal told The Anadolu Agency.
Mughal said that the three slain civilians were laborers from India's Uttar Pradesh state, who worked at a brick kiln in the area and probably didn’t know about the presence of mines in the restricted area.
This blast site is known to have been heavily mined by Indian Armed forces over the past decades. Many such mine blasts have killed hundreds of innocent people and brought disabilities to many others among the area's civilian population.
The Indian armed forces, however, said that the mines drifted into the particular spot and was not intended to be there.
Landslide toll rises
Days after 16 people were buried alive in landslides in the Indian-held Kashmir, four more people were found dead in landslides in the region.
Jammu and Kashmir Police spokesperson told AA that the casualties took place in two separate incidents.
In the first incident in Diwalkund area in Doda district, about 200 kilometers southeast of Srinagar, seven members of a family were buried alive after their house collapsed in a landslide Friday. So far, search teams retrieved two dead bodies.
Separately, in Baramulla distict’s Uri area, more than 100 kilometers north of Srinagar, two people were killed and two others were injured after a tree, uprooted during the landslide, struck them.
Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region, is held by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full.
The two countries have fought three wars – in 1948, 1965 and 1971 – since they were partitioned in 1947, two of which were fought over Kashmir.
Since 1989, Kashmiri resistance groups in Indian-held Kashmir have been fighting against Indian rule for independence, or for unification with neighboring Pakistan.
More than 70,000 people have reportedly been killed in the conflict so far and India maintains a massive military presence in the occupied region with over half a million troops to control the Kashmiri population.
