Indian Parliament Condemns Pakistan
India's lower house of Parliament unanimously condemned Pakistan on Friday and accused it of being behind a series of terrorist attacks, as cross-border firing left five civilians dead on both sides of their frontier.
However, the government stopped short of threatening to attack its nuclear-armed rival despite loud and angry calls from lawmakers during a marathon debate.
In a unanimously approved resolution read out on national television, Speaker Manohar Joshi named two Pakistan-based Islamic groups, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as the perpetrators of Tuesday's attack on a passenger bus and an army base in which 34 people died.
The resolution accused Pakistan of not honoring earlier peace agreements aimed at de-escalating tensions on the subcontinent.
Although it did not call for the launching of a retaliatory attack against Pakistan, the resolution was the harshest condemnation of Pakistan by India's leaders since the start of a series of terrorism attacks, including one in December on the Parliament building itself.
Earlier Friday, a bomb on a motor scooter exploded outside the state fire department headquarters in India's portion of disputed Kashmir, killing one person and injuring 13 others, police said.
Police said they began firing warning shots immediately after the homemade device exploded, and sealed off the area. The fire office is next door to the main administrative building in Srinagar, the summer capital of the state.
"Most probably the bomb was planted by militants" using a boobytrapped motor scooter, a police official said. He some of the wounded were in critical condition. No further details were available.
No militant group has claimed responsibility for the blast in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state where a separatist revolt has been raging since 1989.
The explosion happened as Parliament in New Delhi debated how to react to an attack Tuesday on an Indian army base in Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, that killed 34 people. India's government blamed Pakistan for that attack. Pakistan denied the charge.
The United States and other allies are gravely concerned that a fourth war between the South Asian nuclear-armed rivals could be imminent, as a million Pakistani and Indian troops are on war alert along their border.
Pakistan says it backs the "freedom fighters" with ideology, but not money or weapons, and that it cannot restrict their movement across the densely forested Himalayan frontier.