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Indian troops storm hotel, find bodies but no militants

Indian troops stormed a hotel in Kashmir's main city yesterday where suspected militants were holed up and found three dead bodies, a security spokesman said.

Two of the dead were Javed Shah, a publisher of an Urdu-language newspaper and a former member of the state assembly and his bodyguard. It was not clear if they were killed in crossfire or by the militants.

The third body had yet to be identified, police said.

The attack came a day after Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee began a two-day visit to Kashmir.

The top two floors of the hotel caught fire in the raid, causing extensive damage.

"We suspect that the bodies of the two militants are buried in the rubble and we are continuing our search," Gopal Sharma, director-general of Jammu and Kashmir police, told reporters near the site of the gun battle.

A security spokesman said about six people had been rescued from the hotel during the night.

A member of a little-known militant group, Al-Mansoorian, called up newspapers in Srinagar late on Wednesday and said it had attempted a suicide attack on the government telegraph office next to the hotel.

The region has been at the heart of decades of hostility with Pakistan.

Vajpayee, his deputy Lal Krishna Advani, and chief ministers of several states are holding a meeting on relations between the central government and the states in Srinagar to underline what New Delhi says is a gradual return to normalcy.
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