Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir fired tear gas in a clash with hundreds of rock-throwing protesters demanding an independent probe into nearly 1,000 unidentified graves recently discovered in the region.
About 350 people gathered for a protest that began peacefully on Friday but turned violent when protesters began to pelt police and soldiers with stones, a local police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
At least six protesters and two television cameramen were injured, the police officer said.
The protests began after a top separatist leader, Mirwaiz Omer Farooq, demanded a probe by international human rights groups during Friday prayers in the main mosque in Srinagar, the main city in India’s Jammu-Kashmir state.
The new spate of protests come after the Association of Parents of Disappeared People, a prominent local rights group, said in a report last month it discovered 940 unidentified graves scattered in cemeteries around the violence-wracked town of Uri. The town is located near the Line of Control, the de facto frontier that divides Indian and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
The rights group said some of the graves may hold the bodies of innocent people who disappeared and were killed by Indian government forces.
The Indian army has dismissed the report as an attempt to malign the military.
Earlier on Friday, hundreds of people offered funeral prayers for the unidentified people buried in the unmarked graves.
Human rights groups say an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people have disappeared since violence erupted in Kashmir in 1989.
More than a dozen rebel groups in Indian-controlled Kashmir have been fighting for independence or a union with predominantly Muslim Pakistan. More than 68,000 people have died in the conflict.
The Indian government says most of the people who have disappeared in the conflict are Kashmiri youths who crossed into Pakistan for weapons training.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, but the territory is claimed by both countries and has been the cause of two of their three wars since they won independence from Britain in 1947.
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