KHOST, (Afghanistan), June 22 (Reuters): Rockets fired from Pakistan hit a residential area in eastern Afghanistan killing four civilians, Afghan officials said Sunday, one of three cross-border attacks around the same time overnight.
Tension has mounted between the neighbors with Pakistan saying 11 of its soldiers were killed in an airstrike by US forces operating from Afghanistan on June 10. Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened five days later to send troops across the frontier to hunt down Taliban militants based in Pakistan.
In the latest attack to come to light, a woman and three children were killed when rockets launched from about 300 meters (yards) inside Pakistani territory landed in the eastern town of Khost, the provincial governor Arsala Jamal said. Eight people were wounded in the attack, most of them women.
At around the same time on Saturday evening, a rocket fired from Pakistan hit a hospital in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, killing a man and wounding another man and a woman, the provincial governor said.
Also at the same time, three artillery shells fired from Pakistan landed in an Afghan army camp and three more landed close to a NATO base in the eastern Afghan province of Paktika, the alliance said. There were no casualties, but NATO forces returned fire.
Pakistan's army denied firing artillery into Paktika and said the rounds could have been fired by militants.
International forces and militants exchanged fire on the Afghan side of the border and Pakistani forces also fired at the militants on the frontier in the North Waziristan region, Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said.
"No it's not possible. It was not from our fire, it could have been the militants' fire but not from our positions," Abbas said when asked about the NATO report of shells landing close to one of its forward bases and inside an Afghan army compound.
"We openly engaged the militants on the border, who the Afghan forces were also engaging. There is no possibility of our engaging the camps of the Afghan forces inside Afghanistan."
Though Afghanistan and Pakistan are both US allies, their poorly defined border is a major source of distrust.
Afghan and NATO forces battling the Taliban say the militants are able to train and launch attacks into Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Pakistan's lawless ethnic Pashtun tribal belt.
Pakistan acknowledges the Taliban might get some help from militant allies in Pakistan but says it is doing all it can to stop the movement of militants across the border.
