The violence in Indian Kashmir has fallen to its lowest level since militants launched a revolt some 20 years ago, officials said yesterday, but warned against complacency.
Killings have dropped to one a day, from 10 daily in 2001 and a peak of 13 in 1996, when the insurgency against Indian rule was at its high with daily bomb attacks and gunbattles, official police records in Kashmir showed.
“The militant violence has fallen to an all-time low,” a police officer said, requesting not to be named because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He said during the first seven months of this year, an estimated 195 people — 113 militants, 45 civilians and 37 security personnel — were killed in the region.
“For the first time since 1989, the daily death toll has dropped to one,” the officer said, referring to the year when the separatist revolt began in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region.
The levels of violence dipped after India and Pakistan, whose territorial dispute over Kashmir has triggered two wars, embarked on a peace process in 2004.
Indian officials also attribute the drop to India’s fencing of the border between the two countries and what they say are more effective counter-insurgency tactics.
The insurgency has left more than 47,000 people dead, official figures show. Human rights groups put the toll at 70,000 dead and disappeared.
Despite the easing of violence, Indian Kashmir’s senior minister Ali Mohammed Sagar opposed any reduction in troop levels in the state, a key demand of main opposition Peoples Democratic Party.
He warned that it was not wise to “lower our guard as some incidents [of violence] were still taking place.”
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
DEFIANT: Ukraine and the EU voiced concern that ICC member Mongolia might not execute an international warrant for Putin’s arrest over war crimes in Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin was yesterday visiting Mongolia with no sign that the host country would bow to calls to arrest him on an international warrant for alleged war crimes stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The trip is Putin’s first to a member country of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it issued the warrant about 18 months ago. Ahead of his visit, Ukraine called on Mongolia to hand Putin over to the court in The Hague, and the EU expressed concern that Mongolia might not execute the warrant. A spokesperson for Putin last week said that the Kremlin