(Reuters) - India's army said on Tuesday that Pakistani troops had helped a group of 30 to 40 insurgents stage the biggest incursion in Kashmir in years, linking it to a plan to push fighters into the region as foreign forces withdraw from neighboring Afghanistan.
Army chief General Bikram Singh's remarks were the first direct allegation against Pakistan since the heavily-armed fighters crossed the Line of Control in Kashmir last month in a setback for a government already seen as soft and indecisive.
The men were holed up in an abandoned village in the Keran sector for nearly a fortnight, an Indian army source earlier told Reuters. That prompted comparisons with the Kargil conflict further north in 1999, when hundreds of Pakistan-backed irregular troops occupied bunkers along a vast swath of the frontier.
"With the eyeball-to-eyeball deployment along the Line of Control, it is well-nigh impossible for the terrorists to do any activity without the knowledge of the Pakistani army," Singh told the Times Now television.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir. The two armies frequently exchanged artillery fire across the Himalayan region for years until a 2003 ceasefire that has been fraying in recent months.
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