At least three suspected rebel fighters and one Indian soldier have been killed in separate firefights in Indian administered Kashmir less than a week after Interior Minister Amit Shah visited the disputed territory.

The Indian army said on Saturday that Indian soldiers killed three fighters in a gun battle that began on Wednesday in a remote forest in Kishtwar in southern Kashmir.

Senior Indian army official Brigadier JBS Rathi said troops had displayed “great tactical acumen”.

“In the gun battle, three terrorists were neutralised,” he told reporters on Saturday in a commonly used term for rebels opposed to Indian rule in Kashmir.

Weapons and “war-like stores” were recovered from the site, the army’s White Knight Corps posted on social media platform X.

A soldier was killed in a separate incident late on Friday night in Sunderbani district along the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border that cuts Indian-administered Kashmir into two.

The White Knight Corps said on X troops had “foiled an infiltration attempt” there.

Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947, with both claiming the territory in full but governing only part of it.

India has an estimated 500,000 soldiers deployed in the territory after an armed uprising against Indian rule in the late 1980s.

Thousands of people, most of them Kashmir civilians, have been killed as rebel groups have fought Indian forces, seeking independence for Kashmir or its merger with Pakistan.

In 2019, a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir and called for a commission of inquiry into the allegations. The report came nearly a year after the then UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Husseincalled for an international investigation into abuses in the Muslim-majority region.

Last month, four police officers and two suspected rebels were killed in the region in a clash that also wounded several police officers.

The territory has simmered in anger since 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended the region’s semi-autonomy and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms while intensifying military operations.

Thousands of additional troops, including special forces, were deployed across southern mountainous areas last year following a series of deadly rebel attacks that killed more than 50 soldiers over three years.

India regularly blames Pakistan for pushing rebels across the LoC to launch attacks on Indian forces.

[Aljazeera]