At least two militants were killed Tuesday in an overnight fierce gunfight with government forces in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said.

Indian Kashmir officially became a federally ruled territory Thursday, nearly three months after New Delhi stripped its decades-old special status, but peace remains elusive in the Himalayan region that has been wracked by a violent separatist insurgency and is the flashpoint of its dispute with Pakistan.

Unidentified gunmen shot dead five migrant labourers in Indian-administered Kashmir on Tuesday, police said, in the bloodiest incident since New Delhi moved to strip the region of its autonomy.

Suspected militants shot and killed two drivers and set fire to their apple trucks in Indian Kashmir on Thursday, a senior police official said. The official said the attack took place in south Kashmir’s Shopian district, which is a major apple-growing region and a hotbed of militancy that has raged in Indian Kashmir for decades.

Separatists are waging violence against civilians in the Kashmir Valley, in a bid to bring the region to a halt.

Pakistan has activated at least 20 terror camps and another 20 launch pads along the Line of Control with increased efforts to ensure infiltration of as many terrorists as it can into Jammu and Kashmir before the onset of winter, officials said on Tuesday.

India will become the fifth nation in the world after the US, Russia, France and Israel to develop and deliver its first domestic beyond visual range air-to-air missile (BVRAAM) to the country’s air force, a defence research official said.

Security forces killed six militants in Jammu and Kashmir yesterday, police said, as the region simmers under a lockdown imposed by New Delhi after it revoked its constitutional autonomy in August.

Since the partition of India in 1947, which established the two independent states of India and Pakistan, Pakistan has infiltrated soldiers into Indian Kashmir, assisted anti-Indian Muslim terrorists in Jammu-Kashmir and sponsored many murderous operations inside India proper.

Four men carrying pistols and wearing black masks knocked a week ago on the Hamidullah family’s gate. Furious that the wealthy apple traders had violated their ban on doing business, the militants announced that there was a price to pay.