NEW DELHI, June 30: Pakistan’s new high commissioner to India, Aziz Ahmed Khan, arrived in New Delhi on Monday saying he expected to be a conduit to peaceful ties between the two countries.
Mr Khan’s arrival via the Wagah land border was greeted by Indian news reports of Pakistan’s alleged shelling and India’s apparent retaliatory firing across the Line of Control in Kashmir’s Kupwara sector.
“It will be my endeavour to work for good neighbourly relations between India and Pakistan based on internationally recognized principle of sovereign equality,” Mr Khan was quoted by the United News of India as telling reporters soon after he crossed into India.
Mr Khan, who has already served once earlier in India as a senior official in the 1980s, was received by senior officials as he entered the Indian territory along with his wife and some Pakistani diplomats.
Mr Khan, who is expected to take up his assignment on Tuesday, was confident that the normalization process between the two countries would receive a momentum with his arrival.
“I will accord top priority to resolving all issues with India through negotiations,” he said.
The Press Trust of India reporting from Srinagar said Pakistani troops on Monday resorted to cross-border shelling along the Line of Control, “targetting forward posts and villages in Keran sector of Kupwara district in Jammu and Kashmir.”
It quoted official sources as saying there was no report of any casualty in the shelling which started at around 9am and continued for nearly three hours.
The sources said Pakistani troops used artillery fire and mortars during the shelling.
Indian troops guarding the borders retaliated, the sources said, adding, casualties suffered by the Pakistani side was not immediately known.
Meanwhile, the Indian envoy-designate and current ambassador to China, Shivshankar Menon, is expected to reach Islamabad by July 10, after winding up his stay in Beijing.
Mr Khan succeeds Ashraf Jahangir Qazi who was sent to Washington following last year’s military tensions between the two countries.
