SRINAGAR, India (AP) - Government forces fired at Muslim protesters for a second day Tuesday as they defied a curfew in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing six, police said.

Thousands of government forces enforced the indefinite curfew, which was imposed in most of the Indian-administered Himalayan region after a leader of an alliance of nonviolent separatist groups and three others were killed Monday during a protest by tens of thousands of Muslims.

They were opposing a blockade by Hindus of a key highway that has stranded hundreds of trucks carrying food and other supplies in and out of the region.

Three protesters were killed Tuesday in Srinagar, the main city in Indian Kashmir, police said. Three others died in Paribal, a village 40 miles (65 kilometers) to the north, they said.

Soldiers opened fire in Paribal when about 2,000 protesters shouting anti-Indian slogans defied the curfew and marched close to an army camp, said police Inspector-General Botlagauduru Srinivas. Other details were not immediately available.

Police fired on another group of protesters in Srinagar who set fire to the home of a lawmaker, Mohammed Sayeed Akhoon, accusing him of being pro-India, a police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. A 19-year-old resident was killed, he said.

Separately, a police guard protecting another lawmaker in Srinagar, Javed Mustafa of the pro-India People’s Democratic Party, opened fired at protesters, killing two, police Superintendent Atul Goel said. Six others, including four police officers, were injured, he said.

Earlier Tuesday, nearly 10,000 people took the body of Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, to Srinagar’s main mosque and waited for a relaxation of the curfew to proceed with his funeral.

Aziz was killed Monday when police fired into a large crowd of Muslims attempting to march to the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir to protest the blockade by Hindus of the highway linking the Kashmir Valley with the rest of India. The shooting occurred in Chehel, about 28 miles (45 kilometers) from the de facto border separating the Indian and Pakistani portions of Kashmir.

Three others also were killed and several dozen others injured in Monday’s violence, said Kuldeep Khoda, the director-general of police.

Traders say the region faces shortages of food and medicine because of the highway blockade, and complain that hundreds of truckloads of Kashmiri fruit are spoiling because they cannot be delivered.

The violence is the latest in an escalating crisis that began in June with a dispute over land near a Hindu shrine and has inflamed tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

The Hindu minority was angered when the state government reversed a decision to give 99 acres (40 hectares) of land to a Hindu trust to build facilities for pilgrims near the shrine. Muslims had complained that the gift of land would alter the religious balance in the region.