Nine dead after gunmen storm Indian police station in Punjab

At least nine people were killed Monday after a 12-hour gun battle between Indian police and a group of heavily armed men dressed in military fatigues near the border with Pakistan. It was the first such attack in more than a decade in Punjab, a state once wracked by political violence.  

The gunmen shot dead a barber and tried to hijack a bus before rushing the police station, witnesses said. Punjab state police forces killed three unidentified assailants who had pulled up at the police complex in a stolen car, automatic weapons blazing, at about 5 a.m. Monday morning, local time.

Three policemen and three civilians were also killed, according to the home ministry.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top ministers have not made detailed statements on the attack, which is likely to raise tensions with Pakistan if it is proven to have originated across the border.

The state of Punjab was once home to an armed Sikh separatist movement in the 1980s. The revolt was put down with a crackdown by state and central security forces, arbitrary arrests and long-term incarceration of insurgent leaders.

Attacks on security installations by fighters dressed as soldiers or police are common in the neighboring state of Jammu and Kashmir, but Monday's was the first such assault in Punjab in 13 years, according to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which tracks violence.

Shoe shop owner Amit Sharma, 43, was woken by the sound of gunfire at dawn. "I thought someone was setting off firecrackers," Sharma told Reuters. Instead, he saw three men with assault rifles "spraying bullets everywhere."

Throughout the day, bouts of small arms fire echoed across the town of Dinanagar and the paddy fields surrounding it, some 10 miles from the international border, witnesses told Reuters.

The siege focused on an abandoned building where the attackers holed up. It dragged on because security forces had wanted to capture at least one of the attackers alive, a senior government source said.

Police sources said the attackers entered India from Pakistan and traveled to Punjab from Jammu and Kashmir, another region that has been home to a long-running armed conflict between Indian security forces and separatists, some of whom are based in Pakistan.

Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Salahuddin, who is based in Pakistan, denied his men were involved in the attack. "They are not Kashmiris,” he told Reuters by telephone. “According to my information, definitely not."

Pakistan has denied any involvement in insurgencies in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and Islamabad's foreign office said it was not aware of any reports that the people involved in Monday's attack were Pakistani.

India's Federal Home Minister Rajnath Singh said he had spoken to the head of India's Border Security Force and "instructed him to step up the vigil" on the border.

Five bombs were also found on a railway track in the state, in a possible sign of an attempted coordinated attack.

The group of attackers came in a white Maruti-Suzuki car they had stolen at gunpoint, a local politician told Reuters. The car was abandoned next to the police station with its windshield peppered with bullet holes, and broken glass and bullet casings on the passenger seat.

Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan have fought three wars since both nations gained independence in 1947.

Reuters