Police arrested three Kashmiri separatist leaders in India-administered Kashmir as protestors defied a curfew in the region and clashed with security forces Monday, leaving 22 people injured, officials said.
Two senior leaders of the separatist Hurriyat Conference, hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani and moderate Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, were arrested late Sunday night ahead of an anti-India protest march in state capital Srinagar's Lal Chowk area planned for Monday, dpa reported.
Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, was arrested on Monday as he violated the curfew by attempting a march to the Lal Chowk city centre, police said.
The decision to arrest the separatists who led large-scale protests in the region demanding an end to Indian rule was taken at a security meeting convened by state governor NN Vohra, officials said. They were however, tight-lipped about where the leaders were lodged after their arrests.
As an indefinite curfew imposed across Muslim-majority Kashmir valley on Sunday continued, authorities mounted unprecedented security arrangements to thwart the planned march.
The Lal Chowk area resembled a fortress as it came under heavy security cover, with hundreds of police deployed in the area to break up any protests.
Some protests were reported from three different areas in Srinagar as people and activists tried to march towards the area shouting pro-freedom slogans, violating the curfew.
Clashes were reported from the Hajjin area in northern Bandipora district. Fifteen protestors were injured after police opened fire after one of the protestors allegedly shot at the security personnel.
Three policemen sustained gunshot wounds. Four people were injured when police caned and tear-gassed angry mobs in separate protests in the Kupwara and Budgam districts.
The protests by the Muslim majority population have continued despite the curfew, with a man being killed and 50 others being injured in Srinagar and other areas on Sunday.
Daily life in the region has been disrupted by the strike by the separatists, with shops, banks, schools and most government offices closed.
The unrest, the most widespread in the region in over a decade, has seen clashes between protestors and security forces in the Kashmir valley that led to the deaths of 23 people over the past two weeks.
The protests, triggered by a row over the allocation of government land to a Hindu cave shrine called Amarnath, have taken an anti-Indian turn in the Kashmir Valley and led to a deep communal division in the Jammu region in the south, which has a large Hindu population.
While the Hindu groups in Jammu region have been holding protests to demand land be given to the Hindu shrine, the Muslims in the north have been protesting against it.
The disputed Kashmir region is divided into two parts - one administered by India and the other by Pakistan. The South Asian neighbours have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir.
While a section of Kashmiri separatists wants to join Pakistan, another wants independence for India-administered Kashmir.
"We will fight for self-determination for the region. It is no longer a matter of land for the Amarnath cave shrine," Shabbir Shah, a prominent separatist leader who has gone underground to evade arrest, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
"The agitation will gather momentum and people will take to the streets in large numbers whenever the curfew is lifted," he added.