Four people died and 35 were hurt in an explosion in Indian Kashmir hours after troops killed the chief of a rebel group blamed for a raid on India's parliament.
The explosion occurred during campaigning for this month's national elections by Jammu and Kashmir state's ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) in the busy trading town of Uri, near the frontier with Pakistan.
Police said they suspected the attack, in which state Finance Minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig and Tourism Minister Ghulam Hassan Mir were wounded, was carried out by Muslim separatists fighting Indian rule in the Himalayan region. The ministers were not seriously wounded.
A man identifying himself as a spokesman for Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, a small Pakistan-based group of Kashmiri militants, claimed responsibility for the blast. The pro-Pakistan Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, or "Party of Holy Warriors", is on the US terror watchlist.
Despite a slow but steady improvement in ties between Islamabad and New Delhi over the past year, violence continues in disputed Kashmir, where at least a dozen groups are fighting to end India's rule in its only Muslim majority state.
Earlier, soldiers shot dead Qari Ashraf, head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, in a fierce gunbattle northwest of Srinagar, the state's summer capital.
The Pakistan-based separatist outfit is one of two guerrilla groups India blames for a 2001 attack on its parliament that triggered a military stand-off with Pakistan and brought the nuclear rivals close to a fourth war two years ago.
India says more than 40,000 have died since the revolt began in 1989, but separatists put the toll closer to 90,000.