SRINAGAR, India – Pakistani soldiers fired at Indian posts all along the highly militarized frontier in disputed Kashmir for a second consecutive night, the Indian military said Saturday, as tensions continued to escalate between nuclear-armed rivals following a deadly attack on tourists.
The Indian army said in a statement on Saturday that soldiers from multiple Pakistani army posts overnight opened fire at Indian troops “all across the Line of Control” in Kashmir. “Indian troops responded appropriately with small arms,” the statement said, calling the firing “unprovoked.”
There were no casualties reported, the statement added.
On Friday, the Indian army said Pakistani soldiers had fired at an Indian post in Gurez sector with small arms late the previous night.
There was no immediate comment from Pakistan, and the incidents could not be independently verified. In the past, each side has accused the other of starting border skirmishes in the Himalayan region, which both claim in its entirety.
India has described the massacre in which gunmen killed 26 people, most of them Indian, as a “terror attack” and accused Pakistan of backing it.
Pakistan denied any connection to the attack near the resort town of Pahalgam in India-controlled Kashmir, and the attack was claimed by a previously unknown militant group calling itself the Kashmir Resistance.
QUETTA, Pakistan – A powerful roadside bomb exploded near a vehicle carrying security personnel in Pakistan’s restive southwest on Friday, killing four troops and wounding three others, police said.
The attack occurred in Quetta, the capital of the Balochistan province, according to a local police chief, Naveed Ahmad.
No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, but suspicion is likely to fall on ethnic Baloch separatists, who frequently target security forces and civilians in the province as well as other parts of the country.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, in a statement, denounced the bombing and paid tribute to the security forces for sacrificing their lives to restore peace in the country.
The latest attack came a day after a roadside bomb hit a vehicle and killed three people in Kalat, a district in Balochistan. No one has claimed responsibility for the overnight attack.
Balochistan has been the scene of a long-running insurgency in Pakistan, with an array of separatist groups, including the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States in 2019, staging attacks.
Indian security force personnel stand guard at the site of a suspected militant attack on tourists in Baisaran near Pahalgam in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district, April 24, 2025. REUTERS
SRINAGAR – Armed police and soldiers searched homes and forests for militants in Indian Kashmir on Friday and India’s army chief visited the area to review security, after the killing of 26 men earlier this week – the worst attack on civilians in nearly two decades.
The militant attack triggered outrage and grief in India, along with calls for action against neighbour Pakistan, whom New Delhi accuses of funding and encouraging terrorism in Kashmir, a region both nations claim and have fought two wars over.
India’s army chief visited Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir, and authorities scoured Pahalgam, the scenic town where the militant attack took place on Tuesday.
India has said there were Pakistani elements in Tuesday’s attack, when militants shot 26 men in a meadow in the Pahalgam area. Islamabad has denied any involvement.
Indian financial markets plummeted earlier in the day but recovered some of their losses by the close of trade. The key stock indexes ended lower by 0.7%-0.9%, while the Indian rupee ended 0.2% down, while the 10-year benchmark bond yield rose four basis points.
The nuclear-armed nations have unleashed a raft of measures against each other, with India keeping a critical river water-sharing treaty in abeyance and Pakistan closing its airspace to Indian airlines, among other steps.
General Upendra Dwivedi visited Kashmir on Friday to review security arrangements a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to chase the perpetrators to “the ends of the earth”.
India’s chief opposition leader Rahul Gandhi also visited Srinagar on Friday, meeting the injured and local government heads.
India’s top two carriers IndiGo and Air India said some of their international routes, including to the United States and Europe, would be affected by the closure of Pakistani airspace, leading to extended flight times and diversions.
There have been calls for and fears that India could conduct a military strike in Pakistani territory as it did in 2019 in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Indian-controlled Kashmir that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police.
Several leaders of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have called for military action against Pakistan.
The two countries both claim Muslim-majority Kashmir in full, but rule it in part. India, a Hindu majority nation, has long accused Islamic Pakistan of aiding separatists who have battled security forces in its part of the territory – accusations Islamabad denies.
Indian officials say Tuesday’s attack had “cross-border linkages”. Kashmiri police, in notices identifying three people “involved” in the violence, said two of them were Pakistani nationals. India has not elaborated on the links or shared proof.
Those killed in the attack came from all over India, Modi has said.
Television channels showed funerals of victims taking place in several states and newspapers carried photos of women grieving and people praying in front of funeral pyres.
Early on Friday, authorities in Indian Kashmir demolished the houses of two suspected militants, one of whom is a suspect in Tuesday’s attack, an official said.
Governments in many states ruled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have torn down what they say are illegal houses or shops of people accused of crimes, many of them Muslims, in what has come to be popularly known as “instant, bulldozer justice”.
In an unrelated incident, sporadic firing was reported along the Line of Control that divides Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, the Indian army said on Friday, despite a 2021 ceasefire which has been violated several times.
Members of Indian security personnel patrol on a highway leading to South Kashmir’s Pahalgam, following a suspected militant attack, in Marhama village, in Kashmir, April 23, 2025. REUTERS
ISLAMABAD/SRINAGAR, India, April 24 – Pakistan closed its air space for Indian airlines and rejected New Delhi’s suspension of a critical water sharing treaty on Thursday in retaliation for India’s response to a deadly Islamist militant attack on tourists in Indian Kashmir.
The tit-for-tat announcements took relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours, who have fought three wars, to the lowest level in years.
The latest diplomatic crisis was triggered by the killing of 26 men at a popular tourist destination in Indian Kashmir on Tuesday, in the worst attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai shootings.
New Delhi said there were cross-border elements to the attack and downgraded ties with Pakistan on Wednesday, suspending a 1960 treaty on sharing waters of the Indus River and closing the only land crossing between the neighbours.
Indian police published notices naming three suspects and saying two were Pakistanis, but New Delhi has not offered any proof of the links, or shared any more details.
On Thursday, Pakistan said it was closing its air space to Indian-owned or operated airlines, suspending all trade including through third countries and halting special South Asian visas issued to Indian nationals.
Islamabad will also exercise the right to hold all bilateral accords with India, including the 1972 Simla Agreement, in abeyance until New Delhi desists from “fomenting terrorism inside Pakistan”, Pakistan’s Prime Minister’s office said in a statement.
The Simla Agreement was signed after the third war between the two countries and lays down principles meant to govern bilateral relations, including respect for a ceasefire line in Kashmir.
There was no immediate response from New Delhi to Pakistan’s announcement.
Pakistan’s dollar-denominated government bonds dropped more than 4 cents on Thursday as the tensions escalated.
Muslim-majority Kashmir has been at the heart of the animosity between India and Pakistan, with both claiming it in full and ruling it in part. It has been the cause of two of their three wars and also witnessed a bloody insurgency against Indian rule.
Islamabad also said it “vehemently rejects” India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty and said that any attempt to stop or divert water belonging to Pakistan would be considered an “act of war and responded with full force across the complete spectrum of national power”.
The water treaty, mediated by the World Bank, split the Indus River and its tributaries between the neighbours and regulated the sharing of water. It had so far withstood even wars between the neighbours.
Pakistan is heavily dependent on water flowing downstream from this river system from India for its hydropower and irrigation needs. Suspending the treaty would allow India to deny Pakistan its share of the waters.
MODI PLEDGES TO PUNISH ATTACKERS
Pakistan’s response came hours after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to pursue, track and punish the militants who separated the men among the tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam area and shot them dead.
It also came after the Indian foreign ministry announced the suspension of all visa services to Pakistanis and revoked visas that have already been issued.
Ahead of his public speech at an event in the eastern state of Bihar, Modi folded his hands in prayer in remembrance of the men killed in Kashmir, exhorting thousands gathered at the venue to do the same.
“We will pursue them to the ends of the earth,” Modi said, without referring to the attackers’ identities or naming Pakistan.
“They have made the mistake of attacking the soul of India. I want to say clearly, that those who have planned and carried out this attack will be punished beyond their imagination,” Modi said to cheers from the crowd.
Modi has called an all-party meeting with opposition parties later on Thursday to brief them on the government’s response to the attack.
In New Delhi, dozens of protesters gathered outside the Pakistani embassy in the diplomatic enclave, shouting slogans and pushing against police barricades.
A film that starred Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in the lead with Bollywood actor Vaani Kapoor will now not be released in India, local media reported, citing federal information ministry sources.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries were weak even before the latest measures were announced as Pakistan had expelled India’s envoy and not posted its own ambassador in New Delhi after India revoked the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019.
Tuesday’s attack is seen as a setback to what Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have projected as a major achievement in revoking the special status Jammu and Kashmir state enjoyed and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.
India has often accused Islamic Pakistan of involvement in the insurgency in Kashmir, but Islamabad says it only offers diplomatic and moral support to a demand for self-determination.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Kashmir since the uprising began in 1989, but it has tapered off in recent years and tourism has surged in the region.
QUETTA, Pakistan – Gunmen riding on a motorcycle shot and killed two security officials assigned to protect polio workers in restive southwestern Pakistan on Wednesday before fleeing the scene, police said.
The attack occurred in a residential area of Mastung, a district in Balochistan, according to Mohammad Arif, a local police official. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
The health workers, who were vaccinating children in a nearby street, were unharmed, the official said.
Shahid Rind, a government spokesman in Balochistan, denounced the attack, which came two days after Pakistan launched a weeklong nationwide vaccination campaign aimed at protecting 45 million children from polio.
According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the spread of the natural version of the potentially fatal, paralyzing virus has never been stopped. There are ongoing outbreaks in at least six African countries prompted by mutated viruses linked to the oral polio vaccine.
Police and health workers are often attacked by militants who falsely claim that vaccination efforts are part of a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children.
Pakistan saw a surge in polio cases last year, with 74 reported cases compared to just one in 2021. The South Asian country reported just six cases since January.
Since the 1990s, more than 200 polio workers and the police assigned to protect them have been killed in attacks.
MULTAN, Pakistan – A speeding truck carrying laborers, women and children fell into a ravine in southern Pakistan, killing at least 13 people and injuring 20 others, police said Tuesday.
The road accident occurred overnight in Jamshoro district in southern Sindh province, city police chief Saddique Changra told reporters.
Hospital officials said some of the injured were in critical condition.
According to local media, the accident happened as dozens of laborers were returning to their homes in Sindh’s Badin district after harvesting wheat in the southwestern province of Balochistan.
Road accidents are common in Pakistan, where highways and roads are poorly maintained and traffic laws are widely ignored.
Afghan refugees deported from Pakistan arrive with their belongings at a makeshift camp near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in Torkham, Nangarhar province, Apr. 7, 2025. (AFP)
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan – Thousands of Afghans have crossed the border from Pakistan in recent days, the United Nations and Taliban officials said, as Islamabad ramped up pressure for them to return to Afghanistan.
Pakistan last month set an early April deadline for some 800,000 Afghans carrying Afghan Citizen Cards (ACC) issued by Pakistan authorities to leave the country, another phase in Islamabad’s campaign in recent years to repatriate Afghans.
Families with their belongings in tow lined up at the key border crossings of Torkham in the north and Spin Boldak in the south, recalling similar scenes in 2023 when tens of thousands of Afghans fled deportation threats in Pakistan.
“In the last 2 days, 8,025 undocumented & ACC holders returned via Torkham & Spin Boldak crossings,” the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a post on social media platform X on Monday.
“IOM stands ready to scale up its response at key border points with forced returns expected to surge in the coming days,” it said.
Taliban officials also said thousands of people had crossed the border, but at lower rates than the IOM reported.
Refugee ministry spokesman Abdul Mutalib Haqqani told AFP that 6,000-7,000 Afghans had returned since the start of April, saying “more than a million Afghans might return.”
“We are urging Pakistan authorities not to deport them (Afghans) forcefully — there should be a proper mechanism with an agreement between both countries, and they must be returned with dignity,” he said.
Fleeing successive conflicts
The UN says nearly three million Afghans live in Pakistan, many having lived there for decades after fleeing successive conflicts in their country and after the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021.
“We were forced to return. Two days ago I was stopped and asked for documentation when they were searching houses,” 38-year-old Abdul Rahman told AFP after passing the Spin Boldak crossing with his family from Quetta, in Pakistan’s southwest, where they lived for six years.
“They didn’t even gave me an hour (to leave), I sold a carpet and my phone to make some money to come here, all my other belongings we left behind,” he said.
Human rights activists have been reporting for months the harassment and extortion of Afghans in Pakistan, a country mired in political and economic chaos.
More than 1.3 million Afghans who hold Proof of Registration cards from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, have also been told to move outside the capital Islamabad and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi.
Human Rights Watch has slammed “abusive tactics” used to pressure Afghans to return to their country, “where they risk persecution by the Taliban and face dire economic conditions.”
Ties between the neighboring countries have frayed since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
Islamabad has accused Kabul’s rulers of failing to root out militants sheltering on its soil, a charge that the Taliban government denies, as Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in violence in border regions with Afghanistan.
KARACHI, Pakistan – At least eight passengers were killed in two separate attacks in southwestern Pakistan, officials said on Thursday.
In the first incident, at least five passengers were killed after being offloaded from a bus by militants, and sprayed with bullets in southwestern Pakistan, officials said.
The incident, latest in a string of similar attacks, occurred in the strategic port city of Gwadar in Balochistan province, where militants blocked a highway in the Kalmat area, and offloaded the passengers from a Karachi-bound bus late Wednesday night.
The armed men checked the identification cards of the passengers before killing them. The deceased belonged to northeastern Punjab, the country’s largest and richest province, according to local media.
Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti condemned the incident in a post on X, saying: “Offloading innocent passengers from a bus and murdering them based on their identity is a heinous and cowardly act.”
No group has claimed responsibility for the latest attack, however, the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) has carried out similar attacks in the past.
Last week, four laborers from Punjab were killed by unidentified assailants in Balochistan’s Kalat district, while four policemen were similarly gunned down in Noshki district.
There are reports of several other road blockades by armed men in Bolan, Kolpur and Mastung areas, where security forces were engaged in clearing the roads.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, in separate statements, also condemned the incident, calling the attackers the “enemies of peace and development.”
In another terrorist attack, three people were killed and another 21 injured in an explosion at a busy street in the provincial capital Quetta.
The injured included two children, while the condition of at least three is stated to be critical.
The police said the cause and target of the explosion were being ascertained.
The minerals-rich Balochistan province has long been witnessing a low-intensity rebellion, with renewed attacks by BLA in recent weeks.
The BLA militants, earlier this month, hijacked a passenger train in the Bolan region, killing 31 people, including five paramilitary troops. Some 33 suspected attackers were also killed in a day-long security operation.
Separatist groups have been fighting for the “liberation” of Balochistan, which they claim was forcibly incorporated into Pakistan in 1947, following the end of British colonial rule.
