Indian troops were fired upon across the heavily fortified frontier in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, injuring a soldier, army officials said Saturday, even as Pakistan blamed Indian army soldiers for the shooting. Brig. Gopala Krishnan Murali, a senior Indian army officer in India's Jammu-Kashmir state, would not say whether suspected militants or Pakistani soldiers initiated Friday's firing, but said that a formal complaint had been lodged with Pakistan. Pakistan's army, meanwhile, said it was Indian troops who “resorted to unprovoked firing.” An army statement said that a protest had been filed “for ceasefire violation.” The overwhelmingly Muslim region has been the focus of two of the three wars between India and Pakistan, who both claim Kashmir. Relations between the two have been further strained by last year's terror attacks in Mumbai that killed 164 people. India has blamed the attack on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group widely believed to be created by Pakistani intelligence agencies in the 1980s to fight Indian rule in divided Kashmir. A gunbattle broke out in the Uri region, about 130 kilometers west of Srinagar, after Indian forces were fired upon, Murali said. They returned fire, and the clash lasted about three hours. This is the first such incident this year, Indian army spokesman Lt. Col. J.S. Brar said. Chidambaram's claim Meanwhile, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram accused Pakistan in a TV interview to be aired Sunday of doing nothing to dismantle “the infrastructure of terrorism” on its soil. “Given the overwhelming evidence we have, I am entitled to presume that official agencies (of Pakistan) were involved (in the Mumbai attacks),” he said, referring to such Pakistani institutions as its spy agency and army.
