India and Pakistan have exchanged fire along their heavily patrolled and contested border in the Kashmir region, escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors just days after a terror attack killed 26 people on the Indian side of the disputed region.
Pakistani solders fired at an Indian position first and India responded in kind, according to local news reports, which said that the exchange was brief and that there were no casualties. Indian and Pakistani officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tensions between the two countries, archrivals for decades, shot up swiftly this week after militants gunned down 26 people, mostly tourists, in a picturesque meadow near Pahalgam, a popular destination in Kashmir, on Tuesday.
India has called the shooting a terror attack without blaming a specific group, but it has taken a series of punitive measures against Pakistan, with India’s foreign secretary saying there were “cross-border linkages.” India announced on Wednesday that it would downgrade diplomatic ties and pull out of a decades-old water-sharing treaty that is especially critical to Pakistan, among other measures.
Pakistan has denied any links to the attack, and its defense minister said this week that the country does not “support any form of terrorism.” On Thursday, the Pakistani government announced retaliatory measures against India, including the closing of its airspace to Indian carriers.
Its Senate on Friday unanimously passed a resolution condemning what it called India’s “frivolous and baseless” attempts to link the country to the militant attack in Kashmir, rejecting the allegation and accusing New Delhi of using “terrorism” as a political tool.
“The country’s sovereignty, security, and interests demand that India should be held accountable for its involvement in different acts of terrorism and targeted assassinations on the soil of other countries, including Pakistan,” Pakistan’s deputy prime minister, Ishaq Dar, told lawmakers on Friday, reading out the resolution.
Speaking about the massacre this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India vowed that the country would “identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers.”
But the terror attack by militants in Kashmir, one of India’s most strictly controlled borders, caught its government off guard, leading to a rare instance where senior members of Mr. Modi’s cabinet admitted to political rivals that there had been a major security lapse.
During a two-hour meeting arranged by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday, opposition leaders declared their support for the government’s fight against terrorism. But many also asked sharp questions about security failures, as well as about how a lapse in intelligence may have led to one of the worst attacks on Indian civilians in decades.
Kiren Rijiju, the minister of parliamentary affairs in India, was among the officials who conceded there had been a lapse. He told reporters that such an incident “must not happen in the future.”
In their search for the assailants, Indian authorities on Friday demolished the homes of two people they said were suspected of being militants in the Pahalgam area.
The rising tensions between India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars over Kashmir, have been a cause for alarm among many diplomats. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. Secretary General, told reporters on Thursday that “we very much appeal to both the government of Pakistan and the government of India to exercise maximum restraint.”
Zia ur-Rehman and Showkat Nanda contributed reporting.