India: Pakistani forces shoot at guards

Pakistani forces opened fire on Indian border guards before dawn Wednesday, according to an Indian official who said it was the first violation of a 2003 cease-fire along the frontier of divided Kashmir.

A Pakistani army statement said its border forces "did not fire a single shot."

Prem Singh, a spokesman for India's Border Security Force, or BSF, said Pakistani forces opened fire to provide cover for Islamic militants trying to cross into India's part of divided Kashmir, where the insurgents are battling New Delhi's rule.

He said it was the first violation of the 2003 cease-fire along the frontier dividing New Delhi's and Islamabad's portions of Kashmir, a Himalayan region split between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.

"It was an infiltration attempt that was thwarted," Singh said. "Two of our men, including an officer, were wounded. The officer is critical."

India planned to "lodge a strong protest with Pakistani forces," said K. Srinivasan, a deputy inspector general of the Border Security Force.

A Pakistani army statement said that troops at two Indian Border Security Force posts had fired "illuminating rounds," light machine guns and small arms in the early hours of Wednesday.

The Pakistani statement said its troops had asked the BSF about the cause of the firing and had been told that the Indian forces had suspected "some movement."

The statement added that the Pakistani troops had asked to meet with their Indian counterparts to inquire into the incident. It said that Pakistan had previously lodged protests over firing by Indian forces at the frontier.

India, an overwhelmingly Hindu country, has long accused Muslim Pakistan of supporting the more than a dozen Islamic militant groups fighting to wrest predominantly Muslim Kashmir from New Delhi. Pakistan insists it provides the militants only diplomatic and moral support.

Wednesday's shooting took place near the village of Akhnoor, about 200 miles south of Srinagar, the main city of India's Jammu and Kashmir state, Prem said.

The shooting took place across the international border in southern Kashmir _ not the Line of Control, the cease-fire line recognized after a 1971 war that has since become the de-facto frontier separating most of India's part of the region from Pakistan's portion.

On Thursday, police said Indian forces shot and killed four suspected Islamic militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Police had received a tip that the four men, believed to be members of the Hezb-ul-Mujahadeen militant group, were hiding in the village of Awagam, some 50 miles south of Srinagar, area police chief Swayam Prakash Pani said.

The militants opened fire as army and police approached the area before dawn, and troops returning fire killed all four men, Pani said. The report could not be independently confirmed.

There was no comment from Hezb-ul-Mujahadeen, one of nearly a dozen rebel groups that have been fighting since 1989 in New Delhi's part of the territory for independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Split between India and Pakistan after the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947, Kashmir has been the focus of the two of the three wars between the nuclear-armed rivals. More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict.