AMRITSAR, India -- Sikh militants armed with pistols and submachine guns freed three imprisoned colleagues Monday in a shootout that left a rickshaw puller dead and two officers wounded, police said.
More than 12 militants took part in the attack in the holy city of Amritsar, 250 miles northwest of New Delhi, police said.
Officials said the gunmen, armed with pistols and submachine guns, drove two vehicles inside the heavily-guarded compound of the district court building and stationed themselves in a parking lot.
When an officer led three Sikh prisoners out of the building toward a prison van, the gunmen opened fire -- forcing the officer to take cover and allowing the shackled men to unchain themselves and join their colleagues, police said.
The militants sprayed bullets around the area during a three-minute battle that killed an unidentified rickshaw puller and wounded two officers.
Police said the gunmen and prisoners leveled heavy automatic weapon fire at an adjacent police station as they fled the court building, which borders a paramilitary base. The Sikhs escaped unharmed, police said.
The fugitives were identified as members of the Khalistan Commando Force, a militant Sikh separatist group fighting to create an independent Sikh nation of Khalistan in India's northern Punjab state.
The three prisoners, captured several months ago, were in court for a hearing on various charges of extremism.
Elsewhere in Punjab Monday, police said seven people were killed in scattered incidents of extremist violence, including an intelligence officer of the border security force who was attacked in a village outside Batala, 25 miles northeast of Amritsar.
Officials said Sikh militants were suspected in the deaths of an elderly couple in Chowka village near Hoshiapur, 65 miles east of Amritsar. The victims, in their 80s, were killed when they tried to stop men from looting a cashbox at a shrine.
A shopkeeper and two customers died and another person seriously was injured when assailants opened fire in a store in Dhariwal village near Amritsar, police said, and officers killed a suspected extremist during an encounter in nearby Kadampur village.
More than 1,000 people, mostly Hindus, have died in Punjab during the past 18 months in a campaign by militants that officials say is aimed at terrifying the minority Hindu community into fleeing the predominantly Sikh state.
