SRINAGAR, April 14: Five people were killed and 32 wounded on Friday when militants staged a wave of grenade attacks in occupied Kashmir, police said.

Meanwhile, four more people died during two separate gunbattles.

Four of the grenade attacks took place within an hour in the busy commercial heart of Srinagar, police said.

The blasts, the first major violence since last year in Srinagar, sent bystanders fleeing in panic.

Afterwards residents scrubbed bloodstains from the roads.

A fifth attack wounded five people on the shores of Dal Lake, a popular tourist spot, police said.

In addition eight people, four of them policemen were injured in the sixth grenade attack in downtown Srinagar, police said.

“Five people have died in these attacks,” a police spokesman said.

Some 32 people were wounded, including 10 police and paramilitary men, the spokesman said.

The attackers were targeting security forces but they also injured passing civilians, he said.

Kashmiri groups Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, Al-Mansoorain, Islamic Front and Jaish-i-Mohammed claimed responsibility for the attacks, said a local news agency, the Current News Service.

“I could see people falling down after a deafening blast,” said Abdul Ahad from his hospital bed after his arms were lacerated by splinters received in the explosion. Srinagar’s main hospital was flooded by frantic relatives seeking information about the victims.

Meanwhile, in two separate gunbattles two militants, a civilian and an army soldier were killed in the southern district of Anantnag late Thursday and Friday, police said.

Police stepped up frisking of pedestrians in the wake of the attacks which marked the first major violence in the city since last November when five people were killed and 60 injured in a car bomb explosion outside a bank.—AFP