‘2 planes downed, pilot taken’
PAKISTAN’S air force shot down two Indian warplanes after they crossed the boundary between the two in the disputed territory of Kashmir yesterday and captured an Indian pilot, a military spokesman said.
The escalation came hours after Pakistan said mortar shells fired by Indian troops from across the frontier dividing the two sectors of Kashmir killed six civilians and wounded several others.
Pakistan’s army spokesman Major-General Asif Ghafoor said Pakistani troops on the ground captured the pilot. One plane crashed in Pakistan’s part of Kashmir and the other in the Indian-controlled section of the Himalayan region, he said.
Indian Air Force spokesman Anupam Banerjee said he had no information on Pakistan’s statement. Earlier, senior Indian police officer Munir Ahmed Khan said an Indian Air Force plane crashed in the Indiancontrolled sector of Kashmir.
Indian news reports said airports in the Indian portion of Kashmir closed for civilian traffic soon after the air force jet crashed in the area.
The Press Trust of India news agency said these airports were located at Srinagar, Jammu and Leh. Indian authorities declined to comment.
Indian administrator Baseer Khan confirmed that the airport in Srinagar was closed and said it was a “temporary and precautionary measure”.
Meanwhile, the foreign ministry in Islamabad said the country’s air force was carrying out airstrikes from within Pakistani airspace across the disputed Kashmir boundary, but that this was not in “retaliation to continued Indian belligerence”.
According to local Pakistani police official Mohammad Altaf, the six fatalities in the shelling yesterday included children. The shells hit the village of Kotli in Pakistan’s section of Kashmir. Kashmir is split between Pakistan and India and claimed by both in its entirety.
Though Pakistani and Indian troops in Kashmir often trade fire, the latest civilian casualties came a day after tensions escalated sharply after a pre-dawn airstrike and incursion by India on Tuesday that New Delhi said targeted a terrorist training camp in north-western Pakistan.
Residents on both sides of the de facto frontier, the “Line of Control”, said there were exchanges between the two sides through the night. In Tuesday’s strike by India, Pakistan said Indian warplanes dropped bombs near the Pakistani town of Balakot, but there were no casualties.
Yesterday, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said he was in touch with his counterparts across the world about the “Indian aggression”, adding that New Delhi had endangered peace in the region by Tuesday’s airstrike on Pakistan.
In New Delhi yesterday, India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said her country did not wish to see further escalation of the situation with Pakistan and that it would continue to act with responsibility and restraint.
She said the limited objective of India’s strike inside Pakistan on a terrorist training camp on Tuesday was to act decisively against the terrorist infrastructure of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group to pre-empt another terror attack in India.
The tension between Pakistan and India erupted after Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed responsibility for the February 14 suicide bombing of a convoy of India’s paramilitary forces in the Indian portion of Kashmir that killed 40 troops.