SRINAGAR/MUZAFFARABAD , 7 June — A pro-Pakistan Kashmiri group said yesterday its members would continue to cross a military control line dividing the disputed Himalayan region between India and Pakistan. The statement from the Jamiat-ul Mujahedeen came as India and Pakistan remained locked in a military standoff over New Delhi’s demand that Islamabad halt infiltration by Pakistan-based militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.
"We don’t see a military line, it is a bloody and inauspicious line. We have been trampling this line under our feet for the last 13 years and we will continue to trample it as long as we live," the statement said in Srinagar. The 740-km (460-mile) Line of Control or cease-fire line divides the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
The Jamiat, which is fighting for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and was banned under India’s new anti-terror law in April, also turned down the proposal. "We will not accept any joint patrolling by India and Pakistan... We will continue to nourish our (freedom) movement with our blood," the statement said.
Meanwhile, artillery duels between Indian and Pakistani soldiers rocked several Kashmiri border districts yesterday leaving two Indian civilians critically injured, police and defense officials said. In Poonch, 240 kilometers west of Kashmir, Pakistani soldiers targeted nine Indian military posts and shelling was still continuing, a defense official said. "Indian soldiers retaliated heavily, destroying one Pakistani post at Tatrinote," the official said. The new wave of Poonch attacks began at 12.30 p.m. (0700 GMT) and both sides fired roughly 1,000 shells at each other, the official said.
"In three sub-sectors, including Nowshera, there was intense shelling. One soldier of the Border Security Force was injured," a police spokesman said. "Three houses were destroyed and some others damaged." Nowshera is 150 kilometers west of Kashmir’s winter capital Jammu.
Indian forces also shot dead the chief of a pro-Pakistan group overnight in Kashmir, police said in Srinagar yesterday. Mohammed Rafiq Lone, commander of Harkat-ul Jihad-e-Islami, was killed in an encounter with counterinsurgency police and paramilitary forces on the outskirts of Srinagar, police said.
Lone, from the southern Kashmir district of Doda, was wanted over a number of attacks and had escaped police custody two years ago, they said. Near Shopian, a Kashmir township 50 kilometers south of Srinagar, two Indian army soldiers were killed overnight in a rebel ambush in Arihama village, police said.
Security forces sealed off the area to track down the militants, but the search was called off yesterday morning after troops failed to find any suspects. Suspected rebels also shot dead a shopkeeper they accused of being a police informer at Batingo in the southern district of Anantnag, police said. Another militant was shot dead near Bandipora township 60 kilometers north of Srinagar. Police said suspected militants had shot dead four people in the Kashmir districts of Baramulla, Kupwara and Doda since late Wednesday.
According to reports from Muzaffarabad, six people, including four children, were killed yesterday as Indian shells pounded border villages in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The heavy Indian firing after a day of relative calm came as US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage visited Islamabad to try to defuse the dangerous military standoff.
The deaths are the Pakistani side’s heaviest losses in a week and push the country’s death toll to 80 since mid-May. "Heavy shelling began in Abbaspur sector in Poonch district at 9:00 a.m. (0300 GMT)," police officer Raja Ghulam Sarwar told AFP. Two female cousins, aged two years and 18 months, died when a shell landed on their home in Taroti village in Abbaspur sector, said Poonch Deputy Commissioner Liaquat Hussain.
Three more people died as mortars fell on the border village of Mahajan in Kotli, a southern district, police said. A 60-year-old woman was killed and four other people including two children were injured in the Khuiratta sector of Kotli, where shelling intensified mid-morning.
