Spy plane row adds to India-Pakistan woes

The Nepal summit marked the first time the Indian and Pakistani leaders had met since their current row began

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- -- Pakistani officials have denied that India has shot down an unmanned Pakistani spy plane intruding into Indian air space over Kashmir.

Pakistani officials late on Sunday countered an Indian report made earlier in the day, by saying one of India's own planes had crashed in an area India controls in Jammu-Kashmir.

Later in the day, Pakistan said two other Indian planes also had crashed in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It identified the planes as an unmanned drone that crashed Saturday and a MiG-25 fighter that went down at Adam Pur airfield.

There was no immediate comment from India on the latter reports.

"The military officials of India are indulging in baseless propaganda to hide this loss," the Pakistani government news agency, the Associated Press of Pakistan, said in a statement.

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Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf left a summit of regional leaders in Nepal on Sunday no closer to peace talks to defuse the crisis centered on the disputed Kashmir region.

The pair shook hands in Kathmandu, but Vajpayee said they exchanged only pleasantries and discussed nothing substantial.

Troops massing

Indian army officials said the spy plane incident took place Sunday at 3 p.m. (0930 GMT) in the district of Poonch in Jammu-Kashmir, an area of heightened tensions in recent days.

"No such incident occurred along the Line of Control," a Pakistani spokesman said.

India and Pakistan each have massed thousands of troops and heavy weaponry along their shared border as relations between the two South Asian rivals plummeted following the December 13 suicide attack on India's Parliament.

New Delhi accuses Pakistan of supporting the militants it blames for carrying out the attack and has demanded Islamabad crack down on their activities.

For its part, Pakistan says the only support it now gives is political and moral and only to what it calls homegrown freedom fighters in Kashmir.

Blair support for India

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was flying Monday to Islamabad to press Pakistan's government to make an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism as a step toward defusing a dangerous showdown with India.

Blair joined India on Sunday in pressing for such a Pakistani statement, implicitly rejecting Pakistan's recent crackdown on Islamic militants as insufficient.

"We've welcomed some of the actions that have been taken by Pakistan over the past few days, but there's no doubt what needs to happen," Blair said at a joint news conference with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee following an hour of talks Sunday night.

During his three-day visit to India, planned long before the December 13 attack, Blair has strongly sided with Indian demands that Musharraf crack down hard on Islamic militants and disavow any support of violence in regard to Kashmir.

Washington has pressed both countries to pull back and said it would consider sending an envoy to help defuse the crisis.

The United States fears the standoff is distracting from its campaign in Afghanistan, but also concerned the conflict could ultimately lead to the world's first nuclear war.