Four Indian troops, two fighters killed in Occpied Kashmir clash

Four Indian police officers and two suspected fighters have been killed in Indian-occupied Kashmir during a drawn-out firefight that also left several police wounded, security forces said.

The Indian army's Rising Star Corps said in a Saturday social media post that "relentless operations" led to the "elimination of two terrorists", a term commonly used for Mujahideen opposed to Indian rule in Kashmir.

The clash began Thursday in the rugged and forested area of Kathua in the south of the disputed territory when a police foot patrol was ambushed while searching for suspects, leaving four police dead, police chief Nalin Prabhat told reporters late on Friday.

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.

Prabhat claimed the slain suspects, who were believed to have escaped a cordon by security forces four days earlier, were not locals, without giving further information on their identities. 

India has an estimated half a million soldiers permanently deployed in the territory, and Mujahideen groups have fought for decades demanding independence for Kashmir or its merger with Pakistan.

Fighting had decreased since 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government imposed direct control of the territory from New Delhi after cancelling its partial autonomy.

But last year thousands of additional troops, including special forces, were deployed across the territory's mountainous south following a series of deadly attacks that left more than 50 soldiers dead in three years.