Heavy firing reported on Kashmir border

Press, 24 October 1984, Page 10

Heavy firing reported on Kashmir border

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi Indian and Pakistani soldiers had exchanged heavy fire on their border in Kashmir after Pakistani troops started digging trenches in no-man’s land, the Press Trust of India reported yesterday. It quoted official sources in Poonch, a border town in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, as saying that one house oh the Indian side had been badly damaged iii the shooting. They said , that there were no civilian casualties. The sources said that clashes had started on October 18 in the Poonch district’s Khari area and had since spread to exchanges of small-arms fire along a 50km stretch of border between the Indian towns of Balakote and Bagyal. P.T.I. quoted the sources as saying that Pakistani soldiers had opened fire when the Indians objected to their digging trenches in.

no-man’s land along the frontier. The sources said that trench-digging was continuing and that Pakistani reinforcements “were seen pouring in ' at several points.” There have been frequent clashes along a line of control splitting the former Himalayan princely state of Kashmir over which India and Pakistan. have fought two wars since 1947. Pakistan controls a* third of the territory and India the rest. ■

Indian newspapers reported in June that both sides had suffered heavy casualties when Indian paratroopers repulsed a Pakistani military expedition during a battle at a glacier in Kashmir’s Nubra Valley. The Pakistani Embassy in New Delhi denied on Monday Indian press reports that Pakistan was conducting important military exercises in several strategic

border sectors. Reports of the clashes coincide with a worsening of Indo-Pakistani relations. The Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, has said that war clouds are gathering over the sub-continent and indirectly accused Pakistan of preparing for conflict with backing from the United States. In Islamabad Pakistani officials would not immediately comment on the reports, but confirmed that a woman had been killed on Saturday by shots fired across the border from India. They denied that there had been cross-border firing since Wednesday and said that the woman’s death was an isolated incident unrelated to tension between Pakistan and India. People often strayed across the poorly-marked border while grazing their' cattle and that could lead to an exchange of fire between troops in the area, they said.