ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Kashmiri militants' "suicide march," which sharply escalated tensions between India and Pakistan, ended Wednesday in bloodshed and bitterness as Pakistani police showered the pro-independence protesters with rifle fire, tear gas and boulders to prevent them from charging across the Indian border.
At least 12 protesters were killed and more than 150 wounded when police were forced to fire for more than an hour into the crowd of about 1,000 marchers as they tore through rolls of barbed wire on a mountain bridge just miles from the Indian-controlled part of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. There, thousands of Indian troops waited with orders to shoot marchers on sight.
As a fleet of ambulances rushed the dead and wounded away from the bridge through torrential rains, protest leader Amanullah Khan, who had vowed repeatedly to walk into an Indian bullet this week, was arrested along with 150 of his supporters. They had walked for three days toward the heavily mined, fortified line of control separating Pakistani and Indian forces. The marchers often had to claw their way along a road blocked by dynamited avalanches of boulders, trees and deep mud.
The protesters were detained by the Pakistani army, which has long supported the Kashmiris' armed insurgency in neighboring, Indian-held Kashmir.
The halting of the march and arrest of Khan--whose Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front has fought for almost two decades for Kashmiri independence from both India and Pakistan--apparently ended the weeklong drama.
But Khan, who had rejected all Pakistani pleas that he break off his march, left behind a highly charged atmosphere between two traditional enemies, both of which acknowledge that they are capable of building nuclear weapons.
Pakistan, which fought two wars with India over the strategic Himalayan region, has served as a logistic and spiritual base for the Muslim Kashmiri militants who intensified their ideological struggle into a guerrilla war for independence from India two years ago.
For Pakistan, Wednesday's crackdown on the Jammu and Kashmir front's march here was, in the words of Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, "very painful."
"We are all very emotionally involved in the Kashmir issue," Sharif told reporters at a news conference after the day of bloodshed capped a week in which politicians and the press in both countries loudly warned of possible war. "It will be difficult for us to do it again and again if this happens."
