At least four soldiers were killed in heavy shelling between Pakistan and India in the disputed Kashmir region, officials on both sides reported today.
At least three Indian soldiers were killed yesterday when both sides exchanged fire across a military line that divides the disputed region between the two countries, a senior Indian army official said on Saturday.
"There is lot of firing going on both sides, Lieutenant-General V. G. Patankar, chief of 15 Corps of the Indian army operating in the Kashmir Valley, told reporters.
Indian officials said the shelling took place late on Friday in Tangdar, near the Line of Control in Kashmir's Kupwara district, 87 km (54-miles) northwest of Srinagar, the summer capital of India's only Muslim-majority state.
On the Pakistan side of the line, an army major died when Indian artillery opened fire, according to an army spokesman in the city of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-ruled Kashmir.
He said the incident on Friday was the result of an exchange of fire. Pakistani troops blamed Indian forces of trying to establish a position on the Pakistan side of the division.
Kashmir is at the heart of a military standoff between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan, as New Delhi battles a separatist revolt in the state.
India accuses Pakistan of pushing Muslim rebels into Kashmir under the cover of artillery shelling. Pakistan denies the charge and says it provides only moral support to the separatists. Pakistan also says infiltration across the Line of Control has stopped. Elsewhere in Indian-controlled Kashmir, two Indian paramilitary soldiers and two rebels were killed in a gunbattle on Friday night in Malpora village west of Srinagar, a police spokesman said.
Officials say there was a brief lull in violence in Kashmir after Pakistan pledged in late May to halt militant incursions into Indian Kashmir from its soil. But they say the violence is now back at previous levels.
More than 33,000 people have been killed in separatist violence in the region since the rebellion broke out in 1989. Separatists put the death toll closer to 80,000.