Source: BBC

India’s army says it has carried out “surgical strikes” against suspected militants along the de-facto border with Pakistan in Kashmir.

The operation was aimed at preventing attacks being planned by Pakistan-based militants, a senior army official said.

He said “significant casualties have been caused to the terrorists and those who are trying to support them”.

Pakistan denies India carried out any strikes and says two of its soldiers were killed in cross-border shelling.

“The notion of surgical strike linked to alleged terrorists’ bases is an illusion being deliberately generated by India to create false effects,” the Pakistani military said in a statement.

Pakistan said its soldiers died in “unprovoked” firing along the Line of Control dividing the disputed region.

A territorial dispute between the two countries over Muslim-majority Kashmir has been running for decades, but tensions flared earlier this month after a militant attack on an Indian army base in Kashmir left 18 soldiers dead.

India blamed the attack on Pakistan, which denied the claim.

What do we know about the ‘strikes’?

India’s military gave few details of the operation it says it carried out overnight.

At a joint press briefing by the army and the foreign ministry, officials said the “motive of the operation was to hit out at terrorists who were planning to infiltrate into our territory”.

India’s Director General of Military Operations, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, also blamed Pakistan for “being unable to control terror activities in territories under its control”.

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“Based on receiving specific and credible inputs that some terrorist teams had positioned themselves at launch pads along the Line of Control to carry out infiltration and conduct terrorist strikes inside Jammu and Kashmir and in various metros in other states, the Indian army conducted surgical strikes at several of these launch pads to pre-empt infiltration by terrorists,” a statement said.

It said the “surgical strikes” had caused “significant damage to terrorists”.

But the army did not say whether troops had entered Pakistan-administered Kashmir or had fired across the border.

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