Police report 15 killed in fighting

JAMMU, India -- Separatist violence in India's region of Kashmir has left at least 17 people dead, Indian security officials said Monday.

Indian soldiers killed eight Islamic militants trying to sneak in from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir along the remote frontier.

Elsewhere, snipers of Kashmir's largest Islamic militant group killed four policemen in an ambush in Gool, 110 miles from Jammu, the winter capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, police said. Islamic militant groups have been fighting since 1989 to separate Kashmir from India. The rebels want to all of Kashmir to be independent or to merge it with Pakistan.

Plainclothes police were fired upon as they patrolled behind a college, said officers in Baramulla, 30 miles northwest of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir.

The officers said they had heard from the scene that two policemen and two civilians were shot, but could not confirm the reports.

India accuses Pakistan of aiding at least a dozen Islamic militant groups fighting in Kashmir. Pakistan says it only supports their cause politically.

The nations have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir. India controls two-thirds of it and Pakistan the rest.