MUZAFFARABAD: Three suspected Taliban militants blew themselves up on Saturday as police chased them in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, police said.

Militants have carried out a series of bomb attacks across Pakistan in recent weeks in retaliation for a military offensive in the northwest, but there have been no attacks in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The Saturday incident will revive concern that the militants are trying to expand their campaign of violence to distract the military as it makes progress in an offensive in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.

Police said they launched a hunt in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, after residents reported that three men had dumped a bag of weapons on a road in the centre of the town.

‘They ran towards the mountains when our men chased them and blew themselves as we got close,’ Tariq Qayyum, a senior police official, told Reuters.

‘Their bodies have blown apart. We have found two heads and a torso.’

Kashmir is at the core of a decades-old dispute between Pakistan and India and the cause of two of their three wars since their independence from British rule in 1947.

Separatist insurgents allegedly backed by Pakistan have been fighting Indian security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir for the past 20 years, but Pakistani-administered Kashmir had been largely peaceful.

Two Pakistani soldiers were killed in the first suicide attack in Pakistani-administered Kashmir in June.

That raised concern that the militants were expanding their attacks into new areas to divert the security forces.

(News sourced from: Dawn)