India Downs Pakistani Recon Plane

India shot down a Pakistani military plane Tuesday near the two countries’ border, killing all 16 members of the crew and reigniting the hostility that last month nearly drove the historical rivals to all-out war.

Indian leaders said one of their MIG-21 fighters intercepted a Pakistani naval surveillance plane that had strayed across the border, and blasted it out of the sky when it failed to land. They said the wreckage lay in the western Indian marshland known as the Rann of Kutch.

“The plane which was shot down had not come with peaceful intentions,” Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said.

Pakistani leaders denounced the shoot-down as “coldblooded murder,” saying the Pakistani plane was on a training mission when Indian jets crossed into Pakistan to mount the attack.

“A blatant and unprovoked act of military aggression against an unarmed aircraft” was how Pakistani Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz described the incident. “Pakistan reserves the right to make an appropriate response.”

Each country claimed late Tuesday that the wreckage from the plane, a French-built Atlantic I maritime patrol aircraft, had crashed on its side of the border. The border, whose location is agreed upon by both countries, cuts through a sparsely populated region of desert and marsh. India placed its air, naval and ground forces in the region on high alert.

Aziz said today that Pakistan’s military is on alert. “One has to be in an advanced state of readiness,” he told Reuters news agency.

Both sides beseeched foreign countries for sympathy.

Pakistan’s leaders limited their response Tuesday to summoning the Indian ambassador in Islamabad, the capital, for a scolding.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they gained independence from Britain in 1947. Despite frequent border fighting, Tuesday’s was the first air-to-air incident since they last went to war, in 1971.

Tuesday’s shoot-down followed 11 weeks of heavy fighting between the two over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. The clashes killed more than 1,000 people and brought the two nuclear-armed states to the edge of a large-scale conflict.

The fighting ended last month when Pakistani leaders, under worldwide pressure, agreed to withdraw their troops from Indian territory.

It was Pakistan’s downing of two Indian jets in May that marked a turning point in that conflict. Pakistani ground forces shot down two Indian MIGs when, they said, the Indian jets strayed across the disputed Kashmiri border. Indian officials said their planes had stuck to Indian airspace, and they soon sent more than 40,000 troops into Kashmir to sweep away Pakistani-backed intruders.

Tuesday’s incident took place near the mouth of Sir Creek, a shifting tidal pool whose exact boundaries are disputed by India and Pakistan. Disagreement over Sir Creek led to armed clashes in 1965, and the issue remains unresolved.

With Indian and Pakistani officials in such disagreement, it remained unclear Tuesday how the incident happened--and who crossed whose border. Senior Indian and Pakistani army officials spoke by phone after the crash, Indian Defense Minister Fernandes said. Pakistan suggested that international observers be called in to see where the wreckage had fallen, but India rejected the idea.

The Atlantic I is a twin-engine, propeller-driven plane used by naval forces in Europe and Pakistan for aerial reconnaissance and anti-submarine operations.

According to Indian officials, Indian radar operators picked up the Pakistani plane on their screens after it had veered six miles into Indian airspace. They said Indian jets scrambled to intercept and signaled to the pilot to land at a nearby Indian base.

Instead, the Indians maintained, the Pakistani pilot turned his plane toward an Indian jet “in a hostile manner.” An Indian MIG-21 then fired a missile that destroyed the plane. Indian officials said their helicopters found the wreckage a mile south of the Pakistani border near Kori Creek in the Rann of Kutch. Indian soldiers stopped and questioned tourists in the area who had come to view today’s solar eclipse.

The Indian spokesman said that reconnaissance aircraft had previously violated Indian airspace eight times between May and July.

Pakistani officials said the plane was attacked while on a routine training flight. A Pakistani naval official told Agence France-Presse that the wreckage was lying two miles inside the Pakistani side of the border, near Badin, about 185 miles east of Karachi.

Pakistan’s navy distributed photographs and video pictures of parts of the smoldering wreckage from an unidentified location. No journalists were taken to the site except a cameraman from state-run Pakistan TV.

“Our aircraft was well within the Pakistani airspace,” the Pakistani official said. “Its wreckage has been found on Pakistani territory.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration urged India and Pakistan to exercise restraint. But officials were being so careful to avoid the appearance of taking sides that they declined even to confirm that a plane had been shot down.

“We have asked our embassies to try to ascertain the facts in this situation and to look into it,” said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. “I can say that such incidents, regardless of the precise details of how it occurred, illustrate the continued high state of tension between India and Pakistan, the need for the two countries to resolve their differences through dialogue.”

White House National Security Council spokesman David C. Leavy added: “Clearly, it’s in the interests of both the people of India, and the people of Pakistan, and the international community if both sides sit down, if both sides can get back to the very positive steps that were taken at Lahore,” the Pakistani city where the two nations’ prime ministers held talks in February.

At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan also called for “maximum restraint” by both countries.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.