Indian border guards claim Pakistani forces fired on them

Pakistani forces opened fire on Indian border guards before dawn today, an official said, adding that two of the Indian troopers were shot and wounded.

Pakistani forces opened fire shortly before 3am to provide cover for Islamic militants trying to cross into India’s part of divided Kashmir, where the insurgents are battling New Delhi’s rule, said a spokesman for India’s Border Security Force, Prem Singh.

He said it was the first violation of a 2003 ceasefire along the frontier dividing New Delhi’s and Islamabad’s portions of Kashmir, a Himalayan region split between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.

“It was an infiltration attempt that was thwarted,” Singh said. “Two of our men, including an officer, were wounded. The officer is critical.”

A spokesman for Pakistan’s military said he had no immediate information on the incident.

India, an overwhelmingly Hindu country, has long accused Muslim Pakistan of supporting the more than a dozen Islamic militant groups fighting to wrest predominantly Muslim Kashmir from New Delhi. Pakistan insists it provides the militants only diplomatic and moral support.

Today’s shooting took place near the village of Akhnoor, about 200 miles south of Srinagar, the main city of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, Prem said.

The shooting took place across the international border in southern Kashmir - not the Line of Control, the cease-fire line recognised after a 1971 war that has since become the de-facto frontier separating most of India’s part of the region from Pakistan’s portion.

Split between India and Pakistan after the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence form Britain in 1947, Kashmir has been the focus of the two of the three wars between the nuclear-armed rivals.