Latest Kashmir Stories

Protests over plans to give land to a Hindu shrine trust in Indian-ruled Kashmir threatened to bring down the Congress-led coalition in the Himalayan state. The region's Muslim majority remains agitated even after the state government rescinded its decision to transfer the land to the trust in charge of the highly sacred Amarnath temple visited every year by hundreds of thousands of Hindus. That decision has drawn the ire of the Hindus in the state's Jammu region, whose protesters have...

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said he was angry and disappointed that India had blamed his government for last month's bomb blasts in Mumbai, which he said was the work of "freelance terrorists." Musharraf, in an interview with Indian magazine Frontline conducted on August 1, said the accusations had been made immediately after the blasts, with "hardly any substantiated proof," as if he had ordered the attacks which killed 186 people. "This is very, very...

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Indian soldiers shot dead five suspected Muslim militants as they tried to cross into Indian Kashmir from Pakistan on Wednesday, an army spokesman said. The incursion attempt took place in the district of Kupwara, northwest of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, a day after Pakistan said Indian troops had fired into their part of Kashmir, wounding two youths. Islamabad said the incident was the first violation of a ceasefire that has held since 2003. New...

By Palash Kumar NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pressed Pakistan afresh on Tuesday to fulfil a pledge to curb cross-border militant violence, saying peace between the old rivals was not possible in the face of terrorist attacks. Singh's comments were made in his customary address to the nation on the anniversary of India's independence from British rule in 1947, being marked this year amid unprecedented security due to heightened fears of violence. It came a...

By Palash Kumar NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pressed Pakistan afresh on Tuesday to fulfil a pledge to curb cross-border militant violence, saying peace between the old rivals was not possible in the face of terrorist attacks. Singh's comments were made in his customary address to the nation on the anniversary of India's independence from British rule in 1947, being marked this year amid unprecedented security due to heightened fears of violence. It came a...

By Kamran Haider ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Fifty-nine years after winning partition from India and independence from British colonial rule, Pakistan's future rested on defeating terrorism, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an Independence Day speech on Monday. Pakistan said last week it played a crucial role in helping British and U.S. intelligence agencies bust a plot to explode U.S.-bound passenger planes in mid air, leading to the arrest of at least 24 British Muslims in central and...

By Kamran Haider ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Fifty-nine years after winning partition from India and independence from British colonial rule, Pakistan's future rested on defeating terrorism, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an Independence Day speech on Monday. Pakistan said last week it played a crucial role in helping British and U.S. intelligence agencies bust a plot to explode U.S.-bound passenger planes in mid air, leading to the arrest of at least 24 British Muslims in central and...

By Palash Kumar NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Alarmed by the Mumbai blasts, a terror plot in Britain and a U.S. warning of a likely al Qaeda attack, India has stepped up security to its highest levels in years for this week's independence day anniversary. The celebrations on August 15 -- which mark India's independence from British rule in 1947 -- have been frequently disturbed by insurgent groups who use the national day to mount attacks and underline their presence, forcing heightened vigil....

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of people took to the streets of Kashmir on Saturday shouting anti-India slogans after troops killed two civilians believing they were separatist militants. More than 1,500 Kashmiri Muslims gathered near Dragmula township, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir's summer capital, after villagers found the bullet-ridden bodies of a woman and a man in a nearby forest. The Indian army said they regretted the incident and had...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Landslides and flash floods caused by torrential rains in Pakistan have forced some 6,000 survivors of last year's devastating earthquake to seek fresh refuge in camps, the U.N. refugee agency said on Friday. Scores of people have died due to heavy rain in the past two weeks in areas stretching from the southern port city of Karachi and the high northern mountains. But people living in the quake zone in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistani Kashmir, or...