India, Pakistan on Alert, Both Have Nuclear Arms...08/12/99
By Neelesh Misra The Associated Press
 
K O R I   C R E E K, India, Aug. 12 — India’s air force and western defenses are on highest alert after the second air clash with Pakistan in two days, amid calls for a measured response to the latest flare-up between the two neighbors.
 
Pakistani troops fired a surface-to-air missile toward three Indian military helicopters and their fighter escorts on Wednesday. The helicopters carried journalists to see the wreckage of a Pakistani reconnaissance plane shot down over the border the day before. None were hit.
 
Defense experts said the Pakistani plane, packed with electronic intelligence systems, appeared to be on a mission to probe India’s air defenses, radar and radio frequencies and possibly to scout out invasion routes through the creeks that slice through the uninhabited marshlands leading to the Arabian Sea.   “This was nothing but an intelligence mission,” Jasjit Singh, director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, wrote in today’s Indian Express.
 
Each country accused the other of violating its air space and breaching a 1991 agreement barring aircraft from the border region.