ANANTNAG, India, Oct 4 - An election agent was killed and more than a dozen people injured in a series of blasts in India's Jammu and Kashmir state on Monday, deterring voters from turning out for national polls in Anantnag constituency.
"Overall voting turnout at the end of the day in Anantnag constituency was only 14 percent," B.D. Sharma, the state's deputy chief electoral officer, told Reuters.
An election agent was killed and four people wounded in a landmine explosion in Pampore, 40 km (25 miles) north of Anantnag, on Monday morning.
"In the morning, IED (improvised explosive device) blasts took place near polling stations. Three security personnel and two election agents sustained injuries. Later, one election agent succumbed to his injuries," a police spokesman said.
Kashmir's leading separatist alliance, the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, had called for a boycott of India's parliamentary polls.
Voting in Anantnag had been set for September 18 but was postponed after a candidate of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was killed in a landmine blast early last month.
The constituency has more than 800,000 voters and 994 polling stations, all of them considered sensitive or hypersensitive.
Many voters claimed Indian security forces forced them to go to polling stations but authorities denied the charge.
"In the morning, they (soldiers) announced on the loudspeakers of a mosque asking people to come out to vote or face the consequences," said the head of Ranbirpora village on the outskirts of Anantnag town.
But the authorities said the presence of the security forces was only meant to build confidence among voters.
"These reports are baseless and we only intensified the patrols in the villages to build confidence among the voters," an official spokesman said.
Two paramilitary personnel were injured earlier on Monday in an explosion near Shopian, 65 km (38 miles) from the state's summer capital, Srinagar.
A police officer was wounded when militants detonated a landmine in a polling booth at Ashajipora in Anantnag, police said.
Separatists on Sunday fired rockets at a paramilitary bunker near Litter, 70 km (40 miles) south of Srinagar, injuring nine security personnel.
Nearly a dozen militant groups are fighting against New Delhi's rule in the state where police and hospitals say more than 25,000 people have been killed in a decade of rebellion.
And to think that the Indians on this site would like you to believe that the turnout in the elections in Occupied Kashmir was really high and that the Kashmiris love India and that the 25,000 people killed were all Pakistanis. Yeah I just saw pigs fly.
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