SRINAGAR, 28 March 2005 — Suspected militants shot dead a grandmother, mother and her infant daughter after the child’s father, a former Kashmiri separatist rebel, surrendered to Indian security forces, police said yesterday.

They then set the house on fire before fleeing, a police spokesman said.

Militants often attack families of police and army informers in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, where separatists have waged a revolt against Indian rule since 1989.

Police had no further details on the killings of the three, which happened in Udhampur district, in the south of the state.

Seventeen people were also wounded when militants lobbed a grenade at a security bunker near a crowded bus stand in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital. The grenade missed the target and exploded on the road injuring 17 pedestrians.

India and Pakistan, which both claim Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, have begun a tentative peace process after fighting three wars and coming to the brink of a fourth over the disputed Himalayan region.

But violence has continued within the region despite the peace process.

In other incidents, suspected rebels shot dead four people while two civilians were beheaded by rebels across the region.

Troops have shot dead two senior commanders of a dominant rebel group, a police spokesman said Sunday.

He said Ghulam Mohammed Malik and Mohammed Ashraf Padder were shot dead in separate clashes in northern Kupwara and southern Anantnag districts overnight Saturday.

“Both were senior commanders of Hizbul Mujahedeen and were on the security force list of most wanted militants,” the spokesman said. Hizbul Mujahedeen was one of the first rebel groups to launch an insurgency against Indian rule in Kashmir in 1989.

It wants to secede Kashmir from India and join it with neighboring Pakistan. Others among the dozen or so militant groups operating in Kashmir want the Himalayan region to be independent.

On April 7, a bus service connecting the two zones of Kashmir will be restarted after a gap of almost 60 years, the first tangible results of the negotiations.