Ten freedom fighters including a top leader and six civilians were killed in the latest separatist violence in Indian occupied Kashmir, police said on Sunday.
Counter-insurgency police backed by occupation paramilitary forces shot dead a divisional commander of the region's dominant Hizbul Mujahideen group overnight in the occupied Srinagar, police said.
Officials identified the slain guerrilla as Javed Sheikh, saying he had been active since the start of the armed insurgency against Indian rule in occupied Kashmir in 1989.
More than 40,000 people have died in the insurgency, according to official figures. Separatists put the toll between 80,000 and 100,000.
Four more freedom fighters died in a separate gunbattle with Indian occupation troops on Sunday in the district of Rajouri, a police spokesman said, adding two security force personnel were injured during the fighting.
Indian occupation troops shot dead five more guerrillas in three separate clashes in southern Poonch and Pulwama districts overnight, police said.
In other violence, two sisters in their twenties were killed and a third injured by a booby-trap left in the garden of their home near Kulgam, 70 kilometres, south of occupied Srinagar.
"It was lying under stones on their lawn. And once they started removing the stones it went off," a police spokesman said, adding that freedom fighters were suspected for the attack.
A 56-year-old civilian was shot dead by suspected freedom fighters in the southern district of Doda while two women and a middle-aged man were also killed in the districts of Rajouri, Poonch and Anantnag, police said on Sunday.