India, Pakistan report firing on Kashmir frontier

By AIJAZ HUSSAIN,Associated Press Writer AP - 2 hours 45 minutes ago

SRINAGAR, India - Indian troops were fired upon across the heavily fortified frontier in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, injuring a soldier, army officials said Saturday, even as Pakistan blamed Indian army soldiers for the shooting.

Brig. Gopala Krishnan Murali, a senior Indian army officer in India's Jammu-Kashmir state, would not say whether suspected Islamic rebels or Pakistani soldiers initiated Friday's firing, but said that a formal complaint had been lodged with Pakistan.

Pakistan's army, meanwhile, said it was Indian troops who "resorted to unprovoked firing." An army statement said that a protest had been filed "for cease-fire violation."

The overwhelmingly Muslim region has been the focus of two of the three wars between India and Pakistan, who both claim Kashmir. Relations between the two have been further strained by last year's terror attacks in Mumbai that killed 164 people.

India has blamed the attack on Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militant group widely believed to be created by Pakistani intelligence agencies in the 1980s to fight Indian rule in the divided Kashmir region.

A gunbattle broke out in the Uri region, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) west of the state capital of Srinagar, after Indian forces were fired upon, Murali said. They returned fire, and the clash lasted about three hours.

Exchanges of gunfire along the Line of Control _ as the frontier separating Indian and Pakistani territory in Kashmir is known _ were a regular occurrence before the two sides signed a cease-fire in late 2003. There have been several incidents since the agreement, with both sides accusing the other of initiating the shootings.

This is the first such incident this year, Indian army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar said.

Nearly a dozen Islamic rebel groups have been fighting for Kashmir's independence from India or its merger with Pakistan. More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict since 1989, and India routinely accuses Pakistan of assisting the insurgents, a charge Islamabad denies.

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