Indian soldiers murdered, mutilated in Kashmir — India blames Pakistani forces

GlobalPost

Two Indian soldiers were killed and one was wounded in a Kashmir firefight on Tuesday on the contested India-Pakistan border, commonly referred to as the Line of Control — and India claims that Pakistani forces are responsible.

The body of one of the dead men was found badly mutilated and beheaded on the Indian side of the border, wrote the Times of India.

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"We condemn the provocative action. The government will take up the incident with the Pakistan government. We expect Islamabad to honor the ceasefire agreement (which came into force in November 2003) strictly," the Indian Defense Ministry told the Times of India.

The incident comes only two days after India and Pakistan exchanged shots in a Line of Control border fight, in which two Pakistani soldiers were injured.

One man eventually died of his wounds.

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A Pakistani army spokesman told Reuters that the Indian allegations were "propaganda," drummed up to distract world attention from the earlier Pakistani death.

Dawn.com, a Pakistani news website, wrote that Pakistani officials deny India's allegations that their troops were behind the "unprovoked firing."

Pakistani news outlet The Nation did not carry a report on the beheading incident at the time of writing, but accused Indian troops of illegally crossing into Pakistan in the earlier, deadly, firefight.

The hotly contested Line of Control is often the site of deadly incidents between the two nations, which have squabble over Kashmir since winning independence from the British empire in 1948.

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