Bomb Blast in Pakistani Kashmir : 3 Dead

Bomber kills 3 soldiers in Pakistani Kashmir

January 06 2010 : A bomb attack killed three security personnel outside an army base in Pakistani-administered Kashmir close to the line separating it from Indian territory on Wednesday, police said.

The attack came one day after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari visited the area, declaring that regional peace depended on resolving the dispute over Kashmir -- a fault line that has sparked two wars between India and Pakistan.

The bomb exploded outside a barracks in Tarar Khal, 150 kilometres (94 miles) east of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

"It was a bomb blast. It could be a suicide blast, but we are collecting the evidence," senior police official Irfan Masaood Kishvi told AFP by telephone from the nearby town of Pallandri.

"It was outside the army barracks... Three security personnel have been martyred and three wounded. The injured have been taken to the Combined Military Hospital," Kishvi added.

Kashmir was split into two in the bloody aftermath of independence from British rule over the subcontinent in 1947. Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan each control a part of the mountainous land but both claim the region in full.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in a nearly 20-year revolt in Indian Kashmir, where Muslim militants have fought against New Delhi's rule, but bomb attacks are rare in the Pakistani administered zone.

Raja Farooq Haider, the elected leader of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, confirmed a bomb exploded in an army area of Tara Khal, a small village with a local population of around 6,500 people.

"The bomb blast took place in an army area. The authorities are on site. We have taken the injured to the nearby Rawala Kot hospital," he told Pakistan's private television channel Geo.

"Police and experts are investigating whether it was a suicide blast or a planted bomb," he added. Militant attacks across Pakistan have killed more than 2,890 people since July 2007.

Washington is putting pressure on Pakistan to do more to fight Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants along its western border with Afghanistan, but the Pakistani military establishment continues to eye India as the primary threat to the country.

"The whole focus of the world is on Pakistan. Regional peace is linked with the resolution of the Kashmir dispute and peace can only come if the issue is resolved," Zardari said in Kashmir on Tuesday.

India has accused Pakistan of arming and funding militants waging the insurgency in Kashmir, although Islamabad denies the charges.

On December 27, a suicide bombing outside a Shiite Muslim mosque in Muzaffarabad killed seven people on the eve of Ashura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar that commemorates the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein.

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