DODA, India – A wave of violence by Islamic militants aimed at Indian-controlled Kashmir’s Hindu minority has left 35 dead, police said yesterday, days ahead of a planned meeting between the divided region’s political separatists and India’s prime minister.

In one village, militants disguised as soldiers coaxed residents from their homes and then gunned down 22 of them – the single bloodiest attack by Islamic guerrillas in Kashmir since a 2003 cease-fire between India and Pakistan.

Prime Minister Singh of India suggested the killings would not hamper efforts to find peace in the region divided between India and Pakistan. “People of Kashmir have rejected and rebuffed terrorists repeatedly,” Mr. Singh said.

India has repeatedly accused Pakistan of backing the militants, even as the two countries have talked peace. Mr. Singh, however, stopped short of blaming Islamabad for the attack.

A spokeswoman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Tasnim Aslam, said the killings were “an act of terrorism and we condemn it.”

Witnesses said more than a half-dozen assailants, some of them in army uniforms, slipped into the village of Thava and, using local guides, told villagers they had come to meet residents.

“When we assembled outside the home of the village head … they showered bullets on us,” one of five people wounded in the attack, Gyan Chand, said. He spoke from a hospital in the town of Doda, near Thava, about 600 miles north of India’s capital, New Delhi.

Following the attack, survivors rushed to alert the army, but the assailants fled before security forces arrived, a police inspector-general, Sheesh Pal Vaid, said.

For centuries, Kashmir’s Hindus – known as Pandits – lived peacefully alongside the region’s Muslim majority.

But the Pandits have been targeted relentlessly by Islamic insurgents who have been fighting since 1989 to wrest Kashmir from largely Hindu India. Most have fled, many to refugee camps in safer parts of India. An estimated 2,000 Pandits have been killed in the insurgency.

The remaining 25,000 Pandits in Kashmir are subject to frequent attacks, and many live in fear.

Hours before the village attack, police found the first four bodies of at least 13 Hindu shepherds abducted in Kashmir’s Udhampur district.

Islamic militants have been blamed for the abductions, and authorities found the bodies of nine more shepherds yesterday, a senior police officer, Rajesh Singh, said.