SRINAGAR (India) - POLICE in Indian Kashmir fired live rounds and tear gas on Monday at thousands of demonstrators protesting over the alleged rape and murder of two Muslim women by security forces.

One police officer said more than two dozen people were hurt in the clashes, including four with bullet wounds.

The Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has been effectively shut down by strikes, protests and curfews since the two women's bodies were found in a stream on May 30.

Indian officials had insisted they had drowned, but the families of the women accused security forces of abducting, raping and killing them.

On Sunday, police said forensic tests showed they had indeed been raped.

The police shooting Monday occurred in the women's hometown of Shopian, some 50 kilometres south of the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar.

Shopian was the focus of a protest march organised by separatist groups that the authorities had sought to prevent by deploying large numbers of police and paramilitary forces.

There were protests in other towns in the Kashmir Valley, including Srinagar.

The deaths of the 17-year-old girl and her 22-year-old sister-in-law have inflamed opinion in the region where an armed insurgency against Indian rule has claimed 47,000 lives in the past 20 years.

Several top separatist leaders, who were already under house arrest, were arrested at the weekend in a bid to prevent further protests. -- AFP