(Top) The body of a suspected militant killed in the shootout in Srinagar lies next to an unexploded grenade. A policeman slides to safety during the encounter. (Reuters)

Srinagar, Oct. 5: The two militants who attacked a CRPF camp yesterday were gunned down today, bringing a 27-hour battle to an end.

As soon as the siege around Lal Chowk — the heart of Srinagar — was lifted by late afternoon, people poured in to see the scars of the marathon encounter. The road, still littered with broken shards of glass and splattered with blood, was choc-a-bloc with traffic.

At one point, police had to lob smoke shells to disperse the crowd. In previous years, an uneasy calm used to shroud the city after bursts of violence.

However, of late, residents of Srinagar have been showing a tendency to venture out as soon as the all-clear is sounded, suggesting that they are getting more and more inured to livewire situations that are little different from full-scale war at their doorsteps.

The markets, however, remained shut for most of the day. Some shopkeepers were spotted in the late afternoon, but they had come only to inspect damages to their shops.

Apart from the two suicide strikers, the crossfire left five policemen, two CRPF personnel and a civilian dead. Eighteen people, including 12 security personnel, were injured.

“We could have finished the operation in one hour but we wanted to avoid civilian casualties,” director-general of police Gopal Sharma said after laying wreaths on the bodies of the policemen.

The militants, holed up in a hotel adjoining the CRPF camp, continued fighting till this morning, opening fire every time the security personnel tried to advance towards them.

The first militant was killed after he rushed out of the hotel and made a desperate bid to break the police cordon around the building.

The second jumped out of a window, crawled some 50 metres and tried to cross the main road. A barrage of bullets chased him to death, but not before he killed seven police and CRPF men and a waiter at the hotel.

The forces continued the siege for some more hours, fearing that a third militant might be lurking around. Sharma later confirmed there were only two militants.

The Al Mansoorian militant outfit, however, claimed that a third member — Abu Hamza — had broken the police cordon and escaped. “Abu Hamza was leading the operation,” a spokesman for the outfit told a local news agency.

The DGP tried to play down the recurrence of attacks on the Akhara building, which houses the office of the custodian of the holy mace of Lord Shiva apart from the CRPF camp. “The militants do it to get maximum media attention,” he said.

In another part of the Valley, the brother of one of the constables killed tried to commit suicide by consuming a poisonous substance. The condition of Mohammad Yousuf Dar, from Pulwama district of south Kashmir, was described as serious.