A five-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl die in the blast, which happened a day after four people were shot dead by suspected rebels.
Two children were killed and five other civilians injured in an explosion in a village in Indian-administered Kashmir, a day after attackers sprayed bullets on a row of houses in the same area, killing at least four people, police said.
The blast happened near one of the houses targeted in Dhangri village in southern Rajouri district Monday night.
A five-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl died in the blast, officials said, adding that the injured were being treated at a hospital.
On Sunday evening, two gunmen opened fire indiscriminately on three houses in Dhangri, police officer Mukesh Singh told reporters. He said four civilians were killed and five others injured.
Police accused gunmen of carrying out the two attacks on Dhangri, which is close to the highly militarized Line of Control dividing the disputed Himalayan region between India and Pakistan.
It was unclear whether the explosives were left behind by the attackers who struck on Sunday night. The authorities sent police and soldiers to the area and searched for the attackers.
Dhangri is a Hindu majority village and all victims of the two incidents were Hindus.
Hundreds of people gathered in Dhangri on Monday to protest the killings, chanting slogans denouncing the attackers.
Members of right-wing Hindu groups protest the killings in Jammu, Indian-administered Kashmir [Channi Anand/AP]
They lined up the bodies of the victims in the main square and refused to cremate them while demanding that New Delhi’s chief administrator of the region, Manoj Sinha, visit the village.
Also in the southern city of Jammu, nearly three dozen people protested the killings, which Sinha condemned as a “cowardly act of terrorism.”
“I assure people that those behind this heinous attack will not go unpunished,” he said.
Later Monday, Sinha visited the village and met the victims’ families.
An ex gratia of Rs. 10 lakh and a government job would be given to the next of kin of each of those civilians who were martyred in a treacherous attack. Seriously injured would receive Rs.1 lakh. Officers have been instructed to ensure the best possible treatment for the injured.
— Office of LG J&K (@OfficeOfLGJandK) January 2, 2023
India and Pakistan each claim the divided territory of Kashmir in its entirety.
Rebels in Indian-administered Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi’s rule since 1989. Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebels’ goal of unifying the territory either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.
Indian officials said at least 172 suspected rebels and 26 members of the armed forces have been killed in fighting over the past year.
New Delhi regularly accuses Pakistan of supporting the rebels, a claim denied by Islamabad, which says it only offers diplomatic support to Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination.
In 2019, India’s Hindu nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, scrapped Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, which gave partial autonomy to Indian-administered Kashmir.
The 2019 move – and subsequent laws and policies – have heightened anti-Indian sentiment in the valley, prompting a wave of attacks by suspected rebels against the region’s minorities, mainly Hindus.
Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government troops have been killed in the decades-long conflict.