MUZAFFARABAD, 2 September 2003 — Five teenagers and a baby girl were killed and seven people were wounded in Pakistani Kashmir when Indian forces fired across a tense cease-fire line over the weekend, Pakistani officials said yesterday.
An official in Azad Kashmir said Indian mortar, machine-gun and artillery fire caused the six casualties in several villages in Kotli district on Sunday.
Deputy District Commissioner Munir Hussain Choudhry told Reuters the dead included two 18-year-old women and a one-year-old girl in the village of Hatli Mohra and three girls of 15 in two nearby villages.
He said “unprovoked” Indian firing on about a dozen villages also wounded seven people including a woman.
Artillery duels have continued across the 740-kilometer Line of Control dividing Kashmir between Pakistan and India despite signs of a thaw between the rivals since April when Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called for talks.
The two sides restored diplomatic ties and some transport links severed after a bloody raid on the Indian Parliament in December 2001.
India accuses Pakistan of training and arming the militants to fight its rule in Kashmir. Pakistan denies involvement in the violence and says India should end its oppression of Kashmiris.
In the wake of bloody bomb blasts in Bombay last week and the fresh killings in Kashmir, Vajpayee said last Friday talks with Pakistan could not be held until rebel violence ended.
But there was no sign of any let-up in the violence in Indian Kashmir where police said suspected militants killed a man and his two sons late on Sunday in Udhampur district south of Srinagar, the region’s main city.
