India, Pakistan trade shots in Kashmir

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan and India traded accusations Sunday of violating the cease- fire in the disputed northern region of Kashmir, with Islamabad accusing Indian troops of a cross-border raid and India charging that Pakistani shelling destroyed a home on its side.

The accusation of a border crossing resulting in military deaths is unusual in Kashmir, where a ceasefire has held between these two wary, nuclear-armed rivals for a decade. Tensions over the disputed region are never far from the surface, however, as the countries have fought two full- scale wars over it.

Pakistan said Indian troops crossed the disputed boundary, known as the Line of Control, into Pakistani-controlled territory, where they attacked a remote outpost and wounded two soldiers, one of whom later died.

“Our army troops effectively responded and repulsed the attack successfully,” said a Pakistani military spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Indian army troops left behind a gun and a dagger.”

But the Indian military said that its troops had not crossed into Pakistani territory and that it was only responding to an unprovoked Pakistani shelling across

the Line of Control that destroyed a civilian house.

“None of our troops crossed the Line of Control,” Col. Jagadish Dahiya, an Indian army spokesman, told Reuters. “We have no casualties or injuries.”

The clash was an unusual breach of an almost decade-long cease-fire that has largely held between the two rivals, whose leaders have concentrated on building economic and diplomatic ties.

In the last major shooting, in September 2011, Pakistan claimed to have lost three soldiers while India said one of its officers was killed. There have been other, smaller, clashes in recent months.

But in the past year, encouraging signs have emerged that relations are thawing.

The two countries have eased travel restrictions for Kashmiris living on both sides of the border, and introduced economic initiatives intended to foster bilateral trade.

Still, military and ideological hard- liners in both countries consider the bitter conflict over Kashmir, which began just after independence in 1947, as the core issue that needs to be resolved. Pakistan and India, both of which claim the mountainous territory in its entirety, have fought two wars over the region.

The remote area where the violence occurred is up in the Himalayan mountain peaks. The closest town of Bagh, about 30 miles away, is itself about 160 miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Col. Brijesh Pandey, a spokesman for the Indian army in Kashmir, called the allegations that Indian troops crossed the border “baseless.” Instead, he said that Pakistani troops “initiated unprovoked firing” and fired mortars and automatic weapons at Indian posts early Sunday. He said Pakistani shelling had destroyed a civilian home on the Indian side.

“We retaliated only using small arms. We believe it was clearly an attempt on their part to facilitate infiltration of militants,” Pandey said.

India often accuses Pakistan of sending militants into the Indian- controlled part of Kashmir.

The mostly- Muslim mountainous Kashmir region has been a flash point of violence between these two neighbors for decades. Both claim the entire region as their own, and the countries fought two fullscale wars over control of Kashmir and some minor skirmishes.

India has long accused the Pakistani military and the country’s intelligence agency of supporting militant groups whose aim is to push Indian troops out of Kashmir and claim the disputed territory for Pakistan. One of those groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was blamed by the West and India of engineering 2008 attacks that killed more than 160 people in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.

On Saturday, leaders of a Pakistan- based militant coalition held a rally in the city of Muzaffarabad near Kashmir, in which they pledged to continue the fight to gain control of the entire region.

The United Jihad Council is a coalition of 12 anti-India militant groups. Many of the groups were started with the support of the Pakistani government in the 1980s and 1990s to fight India for control of Kashmir. The rally was held to mark the Jan. 5, 1949, call by the United Nations for a referendum on Kashmir’s fate.

A 2003 cease-fire ended the most recent round of fighting. Each side occasionally accuses the other of violating it by lobbing mortars or shooting across the Line of Control.

More recently, a number of Pakistani civilians were wounded by Indian shelling in November, and in October the Indian army said Pakistani troops fired across the disputed frontier, killing three civilians.

But accusations that one side’s ground forces actually crossed the Line of Control are rarer. Information for this article was contributed by Declan Walsh, Salman Masood and Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud of The New York

Times ; by Rebecca Santana, Zarar Khan, Roshan Mughal and Aijaz Hussain of The Associated Press; and by Alex Rodriguez and Mark Magnier of the Los

Angeles Times.