Indian and Pakistani forces have exchanged fire along the Line of Control [LOC] separating the two countries as the UN calls for “maximum restraint” amid warnings of a wider military escalation following the latest deadly attack in Kashmir’s Pahalgam town.
Indian army sources reported on Friday that the Pakistani side initiated the shooting. A government official in Pakistan-administered Kashmir also confirmed to the AFP news agency on Friday that troops exchanged fire, but did not say who started the exchange.
“There was no firing on the civilian population,” Syed Ashfaq Gilani, the Pakistani official, told AFP.
It was unclear which area along the LOC the exchange of fire took place in, but reports from Indian-administered Kashmir, said two people were also wounded in a separate encounter in Bandipora.
On Tuesday, suspected rebels killed at least 26 people at a resort in Pahalgam, in the deadliest such attack in a quarter-century in Indian-administered Kashmir.
A statement issued in the name of The Resistance Front [TRF], which is believed to be an offshoot of the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba armed group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Indian police offered a two-million-rupee [$23,500] reward for information leading to the arrest of the three suspects belonging to the group, a UN-designated “terrorist organization”.
The deadly incident has since prompted a significant diplomatic spat between New Delhi and Islamabad, with India’s withdrawal from the Indus Waters Treaty, and Pakistan pausing a canal irrigation project and shutting its airspace to Indian airlines in retaliation to accusations that it was involved in the attack.
The tit-for-tat announcements took relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors, who have fought three wars, to the lowest level in years
