- (AFP) - Three Indian securitymen, six Muslim militants
and a Hindu boy were killed in separate clashes in Kashmir as Pakistani
and Indian gunners traded fire on the border, officials said.
Indian soldiers shot dead two militants early Monday after they crossed
over from the Pakistani zone of divided Kashmir, an army spokesman said.
He charged Pakistani troops with offering covering fire to the militants
to help them sneak into Indian Kashmir.
Indian soldiers retaliated and traded fire on the borders in Kashmir's
southern districts.
The infiltration of militants into Indian-Kashmir is at the heart of the
current stand-off between the two nuclear-armed South Asian rivals which
has seen both sides mobilise about one million troops on their common borders.
Muslim militants, meanwhile, shot dead two of their former colleagues in
Anantnag and Baramulla districts on Monday, police said.
An Indian soldier also died when militants fired and threw hand grenades
at an army patrol in Batagund village, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of
Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar late Sunday, a police spokesman said.
"One soldier died instantly in the ambush, while others managed to
take cover and return fire," he said.
The militants ran away during the clash.
In a similar ambush in southern Rajouri district another soldier died and
two more were injured, the official said.
A Kashmiri Hindu boy, Bansi Lal, was abducted overnight by unidentified
people in the town of Kulgam and his bullet-ridden body was found early
Monday, police said.
Two more militants and a policeman were killed in two separate gunbattles
in southern Poonch and Udhampur districts overnight Sunday, the spokesman
said.
Three paramilitary soldiers were also injured in a grenade attack in the
southern township of Tral, 40 kilometres (24 miles) south of Srinagar on
Monday, the spokesman said.
More than 35,000 people have died in Kashmir since the eruption of armed
militancy in 1989.
Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed
in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual
property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may
not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially
exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent
of Agence France-Presses.
|
