Border clash: Pakistani, Indian guards exchange fire

Sixteen people, including three Rangers personnel, injured in the exchange of fire that lasted for 30 minutes.

SIALKOT:

Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged sustained cross-border fire on Sunday, injuring 16 people here, including three Rangers personnel, security officials said.

The two sides exchanged small arms fire for 30 minutes early on Sunday at a border post along the Sialkot working boundary, Chenab Rangers sources said.

They added that the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) initiated unprovoked, indiscriminate shelling and firing Sunday morning at a border post near the village of Umran Wali.

The exchange injured 16, including six of a family whose house was hit by a mortar shell fired by BSF, sources in Chenab Rangers said, adding that they returned the fire. Meanwhile, Indian officials claim an Indian soldier died in hospital late on Saturday from bullet wounds sustained after Pakistani soldiers opened fire on a routine patrol in the same area.

He was the first Indian soldier killed by Pakistani troops in a year, they added.

“Pakistani soldiers opened unprovoked firing on our Umra Wali post,” said a spokesman for the paramilitary Indian BSF. “We responded to their fire,” he added.

The exchange shattered more than a year of calm along the militarised border.

The two nuclear-armed rivals agreed a ceasefire in Kashmir in 2003 and while it has largely held, short exchanges of fire occur almost every month.

WITH ADDITIONAL INPUT FROM WIRES

Published in The Express Tribune, May 16^th, 2011.