Pakistan rejects Indian army claims of infiltration into Kashmir

India claims its fighting an incursion from Pakistan side in Kashmir with 30 to 40 fighters crossed into Keran sector.

SRINAGAR: The Pakistan army on Wednesday rejected allegations from the Indian military that a large group of militants had managed to infiltrate Kashmir from the Pakistan side.

The Indian army claimed earlier on Wednesday that it is fighting the biggest group of infiltrators in Kashmir to cross from Pakistan in years, a top Indian general claimed on Wednesday.

They claimed that 30 to 40 heavily-armed fighters have crossed the Line of Control dividing Kashmir between the rival nations in the Keran sector. They are holed up for the past nine days in thick forests in the area, Lieutenant General Gurmit Singh told a news conference.

However, a statement from the Inter-Services Public Relation read that "no such thing happened at all."

"This is a blatant lie. We totally deny this baseless allegation."

India claimed that rebel incursions have been rising in Kashmir over the past year, feeding an armed revolt there, but these groups were usually made up of five or six people.

"The army is fighting the largest group of infiltrators including some special troops on the Line of Control with Pakistan in Indian territory. It's one of the longest operations in Kashmir," said Singh, who leads the Indian army's 15 corps that is responsible for operations in the Kashmir Valley.

The army has killed 10 to 12 of them, he claimed. On Tuesday night, it claimed that another group of 10 men had tried to cross over to join the militants holed up some 200 to 300 metres on India's side of Kashmir.

Islamabad denies it is helping militants cross the largely fenced border with India and has urged India to hold talks to tackle the decades old dispute over the region.

The latest fighting was taking place as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif pledged in New York last weekend to work towards strengthening a 10-year-old ceasefire that has frayed in recent months.

But they failed to announce any concrete measures to advance peace talks that have been slow to recover since 2008 when Pakistan-based militants attacked India's financial centre Mumbai for three days and killed 166 people.

Singh denied Indian media reports that the insurgents had taken over a village in the Keran sector and said the military was fully in control of the situation.

"The operation is being carried out in a calibrated manner ... We are not rushing through as rushing through will mean the risk of (our) own casualties."

In 1999 Pakistan-backed irregular troops crossed into the Kargil sector in northern Kashmir and occupied bunkers along a vast swath of the Line of Control, prompting a massive Indian air and ground offensive to repel them.