India hunts Kashmir militants after Hindu pilgrim attack

Around an hour before Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi wassworn in for a third term in the capital New Delhi on Sunday evening, gunmenin Kashmir ambushed the bus packed with Hindu pilgrims celebrating aftervisiting a popular shrine.
Police said Monday the attackers fired on the bus hitting the driver andthree others, before it swerved off the mountain road into a ravine, killingnine including a child.
Dozens were also wounded.
"Three of those injured and the driver who died had bullet injuries," policeofficer Mohita Sharma told AFP, adding investigations continued.
Special forces and police officers were searching the Reasi area in the southof the disputed territory, deploying drones to scan the forested area fromabove, reports BSS.
Officials said India's anti-terrorism task force, the National InvestigationAgency, has also started probing the incident.
Kashmir's top political official Manoj Sinha said a joint operation was "inprogress to neutralise the perpetrators" who carried out the attack,announcing $12,000 in compensation for each of the families of those killed.
Top government official Amit Shah -- interior minister in the previousgovernment, and who took the oath of office shortly after Modi -- warned thatthe gunmen would "face the wrath of the law".
"The culprits of this dastardly attack will not be spared," Shah said onsocial media late Sunday.
- 'Shameful' -Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independencein 1947, and both claim the high-altitude territory in full.Rebel groups have waged an insurgency since 1989, demanding independence or amerger with Pakistan.
The conflict has left tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers, and rebelsdead.
Violence and anti-India protests have drastically fallen since 2019, whenModi's government cancelled the region's limited autonomy.But since then rebel groups have targeted Indians from outside the disputedterritory and killed several.
Sunday's attack was the first on Hindu pilgrims in the Muslim-majority regionsince 2017, when seven were killed when gunmen opened fire on their bus inthe Kashmir valley.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called the attack "shameful" in a post onsocial media, saying that it revealed the "true picture of the worryingsecurity situation in Jammu and Kashmir".
Five rebels and an Indian air force corporal were killed in clashes sinceelection campaigning began in the territory in April, until voting ended thismonth.
Two suspected rebels were also killed in a firefight with soldiers on June 3.
But the vote saw a 58.6 percent turnout, according to the electioncommission, a 30-percentage-point jump from the last vote in 2019 and thehighest in 35 years.
No separatist group called for a boycott of the election -- a first since thearmed revolt against Indian rule erupted in the territory in 1989.
India regularly accuses Pakistan of supporting and arming the rebels, acharge Islamabad denies.