A manhunt is underway after the attackers stormed the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar and opened fire on police guarding Naveed Jutt, a Pak rebel imprisoned in the restive province since 2014.
One officer died at the scene while another later departed this vale of tears in hospital, deputy inspector general of police Ghulam Hassan Bhat told AFP.
The trio escaped on a cycle of violence and were still on the lam. Police have set up roadblocks and fanned out in search teams across Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmire.
Jutt was second in command of the Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is
banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
(LeT) holy warrior group at the time of his arrest.
The Pakistain-based group is active in Indian Kashmire, regularly staging armed assaults on the roughly half a million Indian soldiers deployed in the divided Himalayan territory.
India accuses Pakistain of arming, training and deploying holy warrior groups, including LeT, to foment unrest in the part of Kashmire controlled by New Delhi, where many support the rebel cause.
Islamabad denies the allegations, saying it only provides diplomatic and moral support to the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination.
Pakistain and India both control parts of Kashmire but claim the whole of the territory and have fought two of their three wars over it since independence in 1947.
LeT has been blamed for a string of deadly attacks inside India, most notably the Mumbai carnage in November 2008 that left more than 160 people dead on the streets of the financial capital.