5 Pakistani girls killed playing with bomb

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan, Nov 10: Five Pakistani girls who mistook a mortar bomb for a toy were killed today when the device exploded as they played with it, police said.

Three of the girls were sisters. The accident occurred at a village in Kashmir near Pakistan's heavily militarised border with India.

''The girls mistook the shell as a toy and it exploded,'' Zahoor Gillani, a senior police official told Reuters.

Areas on both sides of the border are littered with unexploded ordnance fired by Pakistani and Indian forces during decades of fighting over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Pakistan and India agreed to a ceasefire along the frontline in 2003 but progress on talks to resolve the dispute has been slow.

REUTERS