based rebel group blamed for last year's assault on Mumbai threatened Wednesday to carry out more attacks in Indian Kashmir after a five-day gunbattle between government troops and suspected insurgents killed at least 25 combatants. The fighting – which started Friday morning when a combined force of Indian army and police began flushing out militants in the area – was the longest and bloodiest in the disputed Himalayan region this year, the army said. Abdullah Ghaznavi, a spokesman for the Lashkar-e-Taiba rebel group, said the rebels initiated the clash by ambushing an army contingent. The Indian army said Tuesday night that the gunbattle left 17 rebels and eight soldiers dead. Ghaznavi claimed 25 troops were killed and 50 wounded. There was no independent account of the fighting, which raged in the forested Shamsbari area about 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Srinagar. “Lashkar-e-Taiba will continue to render sacrifices to free Kashmir from Indian occupation. The coming days will prove costlier for Indian forces,” Ghaznavi told local newspapers in Indian Kashmir's main city, Srinagar. India has blamed last November's terror attacks in Mumbai, which killed 164 people, on Lashkar-e-Taiba, widely believed to have been created by Pakistani intelligence agencies in the 1980s to fight India rule in divided Kashmir. “The Indian army has suffered immense loses during the 5-day-long gunbattle. This should serve as reminder to India that Kashmir's freedom struggle is well under way,” Ghaznavi said. Meanwhile, army Brig. Gurmit Singh told reporters that the militants killed in the gunbattle recently infiltrated from the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, a de facto frontier between India and Pakistan that divides Kashmir between the two nuclear-armed rivals. Singh said the rebels were “intercepted based on absolutely accurate and reliable human intelligence from both sides of Line of Control.” Lashkar-e-Taiba is among more than a dozen guerrilla groups fighting for Kashmir's independence from India or its unification with Pakistan. More than 68,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict since 1989. India accuses Pakistan of funding and training the militants.
