By
The Associated Press
JAMMU, India - Guerrillas used booby traps and rockets to kill five Indian soldiers in troubled Kashmir yesterday, while Indian security forces killed at least eight people believed to be part of the separatist movement, the Indian military said.
Indian troops fired artillery across the frontier dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, raining down shells on villages yesterday, Pakistani police said. The shelling killed a man and an 8-year-old girl, and injured eight people, including four children, police said.
Pakistan says Indian shelling has increased in past weeks across the frontier - a frequent scene of artillery exchanges. Meanwhile, in Indian-held Kashmir, Islamic separatist guerrillas continued attacks.
An improvised explosive device instantly killed a brigadier general and a colonel in a jeep in Jachil Dhara, a village 30 miles north of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, an officer said on condition of anonymity. Three soldiers were injured in the blast.
Also yesterday, guerrillas fired a rocket at an army transit camp from a hide-out in the thickly forested mountains about 120 miles north of Jamma, the state's winter capital. Three soldiers were killed and 15 wounded, said Maj. Gen. P.P.S. Bindra.
"They had positioned themselves on the mountains overlooking the National Highway," Bindra, who heads the army's northern command in Udhampur city, told The Associated Press.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the two attacks, but the Indian military blamed them on Islamic guerrillas.
The attacks came as government forces killed at least five militants yesterday in an encounter in a forest near Kunzelwan Gurez, a town 70 miles northeast of the city of Srinagar, police said.
In an unrelated incident 60 miles south of Jammu, Indian security forces killed three people who the army said were trying to cross into India from Pakistan through the international border.
The border dissolves into a cease-fire line farther north in Kashmir, where India says hundreds of Pakistan-based Islamic militants sneak into its territory to fight the 11-year-old separatist war against Indian rule in the Kashmir Valley.
India accuses Pakistan of arming and funding the insurgency in Kashmir. Pakistan says it supports the Kashmiris but denies providing material aid to the guerrillas.
More than 25,000 people have died since the Kashmir insurgency began in 1989. During the past month, nearly a dozen attacks blamed on the guerrillas have left more than 120 civilians dead - most of them Hindus.
The Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, the largest of around a dozen militant groups in Kashmir, declared a cease-fire last month and said it was ready to talk peace with the Indian government. But it ended the cease-fire two weeks later when New Delhi refused to include Pakistan in the talks.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947 and the two countries have twice gone to war over the territory.
