By Aftab Ahmed, Adnan Abidi and Saeed Shah
JAMMU, India/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Blasts rang out across the city of Jammu in Indian Kashmir late on Thursday during what India’s military said was a Pakistani drone and missile attack across the disputed region on the second day of clashes between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
Sirens sounded and red flashes and projectiles could be seen in the night sky above the city which was plunged into a blackout, a Reuters journalist said.
There was no immediate comment from Pakistan on what appeared to be an escalation in the countries’ worst confrontation in more than two decades.
“Our army installations are under attack, it is happening in five districts of Jammu (region),” a security official told Reuters.
Eight missiles, fired from Pakistan at the Jammu region towns of Satwari, Samba, Ranbir Singh Pura and Arnia, were all intercepted by air defence units, added an Indian military source who asked not to be named.
They were just part of a wider attack, the source added.
Pakistan’s Defence Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, had earlier said further retaliation was “increasingly certain” after both countries accused each other of launching drone attacks.
World powers from the U.S. to Russia and China have called for calm in one of the world’s most dangerous, and most populated, nuclear flashpoint regions. The U.S. Consulate General in Pakistan’s Lahore ordered staff to shelter in place.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for de-escalation in separate calls with Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Thursday, the State Department said.
The relationship between India and Pakistan has been fraught with tension since they gained independence from colonial Britain in 1947. The countries have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, and clashed many times.
The countries that both claim Kashmir in full and rule over parts of it separately acquired nuclear weapons in the 1990s.
DRONES, MISSILES, AIR DEFENCES
In the latest confrontations, India said it hit nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites in Pakistan on Wednesday in retaliation for what it says was a deadly Islamabad-backed attack in Indian Kashmir on April 22.
Pakistan says it was not involved and denied that any of the sites hit by India were militant bases. It said it shot down five Indian aircraft on Wednesday, a report the Indian embassy in Beijing dismissed as “misinformation”.
Pakistan’s military said earlier on Thursday it shot down 29 drones from India at multiple locations including the two largest cities of Karachi and Lahore and the garrison city of Rawalpindi, home to the army’s headquarters.
The Indian defence ministry said Pakistan attempted to engage a number of military targets in northern and western India from Wednesday night into Thursday morning and they were “neutralised” by Indian air defence systems.
In response, Indian forces targeted air defence radars and systems at a number of locations in Pakistan on Thursday, the ministry said.
The Indian rupee earlier dropped 1% to 85.71, the Nifty 50 benchmark share index declined 0.6%, while the yield on India’s benchmark 10-year bond rose 6 basis points.
Trading was halted on Pakistan’s benchmark share index on Thursday after the index slumped 6.3% on news of the earlier Indian drone attacks and closed down 5.9%.
Pakistan’s international bonds extended their losses with the 2036 bond down 2.4 cents to bid at 72.4 cents.
Local media reported panic buying in some cities in the Indian state of Punjab, which shares a border with Pakistan, as people hoarded essentials.
(Reporting by Mubasher Bukhari in Lahore, Saurabh Sharma in Amritsar, Shivam Patel, Tanvi Mehta, Surbhi Misra in New Delhi, Saeed Shah, Charlotte Greenfield, Gibran Peshimam and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad, Ariba Shahid in Karachi, Fayaz Bukhari in Srinagar; Additional reporting by Shakeel Ahmad in Bengaluru and Colleen Howe in Beijing; Writing by Sakshi Dayal, YP Rajesh and Andrew Heavens; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Andrew Heavens, William Maclean, Alexandra Hudson)
