Photo

NEW DELHI — Indian military officials said Tuesday that five Indian soldiers had been killed the night before when Pakistani troops attacked an Indian post on the disputed border that divides Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistani-administered parts.

‘‘The government of India has lodged a strong protest with the government of Pakistan,’’ Defense Minister A. K. Antony told the Indian Parliament.

Pakistan, meanwhile, denied the operation took place.



The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying, ‘‘Our military authorities have confirmed that there had been no exchange of fire that could have resulted in such an incident.’’

The incident cast an immediate shadow on relations that have been warming since the formation of a new government in Pakistan in June. Nawaz Sharif, the new prime minister of Pakistan, has made conciliatory gestures toward India and formally sought dates for the resumption of talks between the two countries’ top diplomats and bureaucrats. Mr. Sharif is expected to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in September on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Indian officials said the bloodshed happened in a mountainous outpost along the Line of Control, the disputed border area.

‘‘One of our post was attacked in Poonch area,’’ said S.N. Acharya, a representative for the Indian Army in the Jammu area of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir.

Poonch is a mountainous district around 170 kilometers, or about 100 miles, from Srinagar, the largest city in the Indian-held portion of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan agreed to a cease-fire agreement on the Line of Control, a mountainous border that is 740 kilometers long, in November 2003.

Before the cease-fire was signed, the countries’ armies routinely shelled each other’s positions and the hundreds of civilian villages along the Line of Control.

Since the beginning of a separatist insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1990, Kashmiri and Pakistani militants have filtered through the Line of Control to enter Indian-held territory. India has put up fencing along 550 kilometers of the Line of Control to stem the movement.

The cease-fire has been generally honored by the two countries’ armies and has been one of the most significant initiatives of India-Pakistan diplomacy in the past two decades. Person-to-person contacts, official and back-channel talks have also helped the two countries resolve their complicated disputes.

‘‘It is important for both India and Pakistan to preserve the gains of a successful cease-fire,’’ said Srinath Raghavan, senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The most recent skirmish between India and Pakistan on the Line of Control occurred in January, when Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers. One of the two soldiers was beheaded.

Indian troops retaliated by killing three Pakistani soldiers. Yet compared with the violence in the 1990s, when killings on the Line of Control were frequent, the disputed border remains mostly peaceful.

Some politicians called for an armed response. ‘‘India has the strength, the Indian Army has the strength, and the Indian Parliament has the strength to send a reply to Pakistan in the language it understands,’’ Yashwant Sinha, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, said Tuesday in Parliament.

But Mr. Raghavan cautioned against the rhetoric of retaliatory attacks. ‘‘If we escalate the situation and the cease-fire goes, India and Pakistan will have to go back to a scenario that would be much worse,’’ he said.

Some analysts in Pakistan doubted the incident would hurt warming ties.

‘‘Nawaz Sharif is firmly committed to improving ties with India. He is keen on renewing the peace process and expanding the economic ties between the two countries,’’ said Raza Rumi, director of the Jinnah Institute, a public policy research institute in Islamabad. ‘‘Sharif also sees better ties with India leading to a reduction of militarism in Pakistan. Incidents like the one on the border or the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul again point toward nonstate actors that need to be controlled.’’

Lal Din, 60, a farmer from Gowhalan village on the Line of Control in the Uri area of Indian-held Kashmir, noted that tensions had lessened recently.

‘‘Before the cease-fire, it was a very dangerous place to live,’’ he said by telephone. ‘‘Several houses in my village were destroyed in shelling, and some villagers were killed.’’

Hundreds of border villages, like his, have seen an era of relative peace since November 2003. ‘‘There is a fence along the Line of Control in my village, and no militants are crossing from Pakistan anymore here,’’ he added. ‘‘There have been no killings for 10 years, and neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis have fired mortar shells in a long time near my village.’’

‘‘It is quite safe and peaceful now,’’ he added. ‘‘I hope it stays like that.’’

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Hari Kumar contributed from New Delhi.